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1. An Economic Analysis Of The Fall Of France In June 1940 Based On The Theory Of New Institutional Economics

Author:
Ioannis Salavrakos
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
he paper challenges the view that the fall of France in June 1940 is attributed to military errors of the French High Command and with the brilliant German offense in the Ardennes. The paper highlights that the French security strategy after the end of World War I failed because the country lacked the economic basis to implement its strategy. Thus the paper argues that the French endorsed an internal and external balancing strategy against Germany. The internal balancing strategy was associated with the ability of France to sustain powerful armed forces and obviously this was associated with high defense spending and a strong economy. The second part was associated with external balancing which was associated with the creation of alliances in Eastern Europe in order to block any German expansion. Again this was associated with strong economic relations between France and these states. This strategy was implemented during the 1919-1929 period however after the global economic crisis erupted the deterioration of the French economy made the continuation of this strategy impossible. Thus France was forced to follow a defensive strategy at the military level and the privileged bilateral economic relations with Eastern European countries were abolished and Germany replaced France as the major economic and trading partner of these states.
Topic:
Economics, Regional Cooperation, Military Strategy, and World War II
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, France, and Germany

2. France's “Indo-Pacific” Strategy: Regional Projection

Author:
David Scott
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
President Macron talks of France’s ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’ (une stratégie indo-pacifique). This article analyzes French strategic discourse and strategy adopted for the Indo-Pacific by France. It finds that French strategy has three main elements. Firstly it has seeks legitimacy, politically seeking to move from a colonial possessions position to democratic integration with France, and has sought to achieve regional integration and legitimacy of this. Secondly, geographically France has moved up northwards from its possessions in the Southern Indian Ocean and Southern Pacific to active maritime involvement in the northern Indian Ocean, South China Sea and Western Pacific. Thirdly, French strategy is to actively secure security partnerships with other countries in the region. Naval projection is a prominent feature of French strategy, which is a strategy which is significantly driven by China’s maritime expansion across the Indo-Pacific. The article thus seeks to analyze, explain and evaluate the effectiveness of France’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Regional Cooperation, Military Strategy, Democracy, and Maritime
Political Geography:
Europe, Indonesia, India, France, Indo-Pacific, and South China Sea

3. A Tran-Atlantic Condominium of Democratic Power: the grand design for a post-war order at the heart of French policy at the Paris Peace Conference

Author:
Peter Jackson
Publication Date:
07-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
France’s policy at the Paris Peace Conference has long been characterised as a bid to destroy German power and to secure a dominant position in the post-1918 European political order. The strategy and tactics of French premier Georges Clemenceau are nearly always contrasted with those of American president Woodrow Wilson. Clemenceau is represented as an arch cynic and committed practitioner of Realpolitik while Wilson is depicted as an idealist proponent of a new approach to international politics. The earliest, and one of the most extreme, articulation of this view was advanced by John Maynard Keynes in his Economic Consequences of the Peace. In what remains the most influential book ever written about the peace conference, Keynes characterised Clemenceau as a French Bismarck and the chief advocate of a ‘Carthaginian peace’.1 This judgement has reverberated through the historiography of the European international politics ever since.2 This general picture misses important dimensions to French planning and thus to the possibilities for peace in 1919. The evidence reveals that the peace programme of the Clemenceau government was much more open-ended and innovative than is generally recognised. French negotiators did propose a highly traditional project to overthrow the European balance of power by detaching the Left Bank of the Rhine from Germany and placing this region under permanent occupation. But there were other currents in French planning and policy that have been neglected. The French peace programme, as it emerged in February-March 1919, was a complex combination of power political calculation and an ideological commitment to a democratic peace based on new principles of international politics. Alongside the aim of territorial adjustment and a weakening of German power was a thoroughly trans-Atlantic conception of a democratic post-war order that allowed for the possibility of political and economic co- operation with a reformed and democratic Germany. The flexible and fundamentally multilateral character of this ‘larger strategic design’ overlapped with prevailing internationalist visions of peace and security in ways that have been missed by most scholars. French policy was much more ambiguous than Clemenceau was later willing to admit. Along with his chief lieutenant André Tardieu, he would spend much of the 1920s denouncing the failure of successive governments to impose the letter of the Versailles Treaty.4 But this post-war posturing has done much to obscure the complex character of his government’s peace programme.
Topic:
Diplomacy, International Cooperation, World War I, and Transatlantic Relations
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany

4. Irene R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh, ed. Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Author:
Deji A. Oguntoyinbo
Publication Date:
06-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
All through the ages, Shakespeare's literary oeuvre has occupied a canonical status in world literature, primarily because of its universal relevance in terms of thematic preoccupation, characterization, and setting amongst several literary components. Though widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre- eminent dramatist, Shakespeare has been translated into every major living language and is performed more often than any other playwright. His dramatic works have been repeatedly adapted and rediscovered by new movements or perspectives in scholarship and performance. Even now, his plays remain highly popular and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in various social, cultural and political contexts throughout the globe. One of these contexts is the Second World War. Regarded as the longest, bloodiest and deadliest conflict in history, World War II was fought predominantly in Europe and across the Pacific and Eastern Asia, pitting the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan against the Allied nations of Great Britain, France, China, United States and the Soviet Union. It is the most widespread war in history with more than one hundred million people serving in military units from over thirty different countries, and death tolls estimated to be between fifty and eighty-five million fatalities. Despite the fact that theatre stands as a “simulacrum of the cultural and historical process itself, seeking to depict the full range of human actions within their physical context, has always provided society with the most tangible records of its attempts to understand its own records” (3), the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War had not yet been given sustained, critical and detailed scholastic documentation. Herein lies the relevance and necessity of Shakespeare and the Second World War – as a writers' quota to fill the scholastic lacuna. Most of the war's belligerents showed affinity with Shakespearean works as a depiction of their society's self-image. Divided into fifteen illuminating, diverse, and yet coherent essays by seasoned and erudite academics, Shakespeare and the Second World War is a small sampling of reviewed and extended essays from “Wartime Shakespeare in a Global Context/Shakespeare au temps de la guerre” – an international bilingual conference that took place at the University of Ottawa in 2009. Within the spatial and temporal context of the war, Shakespeare's oeuvre is recycled, reviewed and reinterpreted in the chapters. In a Manichean manner, these essays cannot be collectively pigeonholed as either pro or anti–war. In fact, there is a sort of ambivalence with vacillating opinions by the writers.
Political Geography:
Britain, United States, Japan, China, France, Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy

5. An Analysis of Sexual Assault in the U.S. Military, 2004-2009

Author:
Dr. Adam Lankford
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
The history of warfare is marked by national armed forces, paramilitary fighters, and rebels across various eras and cultures who have committed sexual assault with impunity. Social norms have changed dramatically since ancient times, but it can be shocking to realize that even some well respected leaders of the past once approved of such crimes. For instance, Moses apparently gave orders to his warriors to “kill every male among them, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”1 This may not have been an overt sanction of sexual assault, but it certainly implies that the enemy's virgins should be kept as sexual companions. Furthermore, as Susan Brownmiller describes, “Among the ancient Greeks, rape was socially acceptable behavior well within the rules of warfare, an act without stigma for warriors who viewed the women they conquered as legitimate booty, useful as wives, concubines, slave labor or battle-camp trophy.”2 Joshua S. Goldstein similarly points out that “The most common pattern in warfare in the ancient Middle East and Greece was to literally feminize a conquered population by executing the male captives, raping the women, then taking women and children as slaves. The pattern…recurs even today.”3 In the last century, sexual assault has accompanied armed conflicts in countries all around the world, including Bosnia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Rwanda, and Sudan.
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Sudan, Bosnia, Middle East, France, Germany, Italy, and Rwanda

6. Don't Expect Much from Japan in the Indian Ocean

Author:
Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
Japan is an Indian Ocean power of long standing. Ten years ago, in a post-9/11 show of solidarity with the United States and to exercise a more muscular foreign policy, Tokyo committed vessels of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF, or MSDF) to the coalition naval contingent supporting combat operations in Afghanistan. JMSDF tankers resupplied coalition warships, while Aegis destroyers guarded against air and surface threats in the Arabian Sea. Japanese seamen posted impressive statistics for this naval enterprise. The Japan Ministry of Defense reported that JMSDF vessels supplied about 137 million gallons of fuel oil and some 2.8 gallons of water to customers from about a dozen countries, including the United States, Pakistan, France, Britain, and Germany. Tokyo spent over $110 million on the logistics mission in its final two years according to Defense Ministry spokesmen, even as demand for such support dwindled.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Britain, Afghanistan, United States, Japan, India, France, Arabia, Germany, and Tokyo

7. "Military Doomsday Machine"? The Decisions for War 1914

Author:
Holger Herwig
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
On 28 June 1914 the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated. The Austrian government alleged official Serbian involvement, issued an ultimatum, and, rejecting negotiation, began hostilities on 29 July with a bombardment of Belgrade. In a linked series of decisions, four other major European powers—Germany, Russia, France, and Britain—joined the struggle. Ultimately, twenty-nine nations, including Japan and the Ottoman Empire, would be involved. In all instances, the decision makers recognized the inherent hazards. They knew their choices could enlarge the conflict and significantly escalate the dimensions of the struggle.
Political Geography:
Britain, Russia, Europe, France, and Germany

8. The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory

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:
Relying upon thousands of newly raised conscripts to augment the remaining professionals from the old monarchial army, Generals Kellermann and Dumouriez scored a decisive victory over the Duke of Brunswick and the forces of Prussia at the Battle of Valmy and thereby firmly established the foundation for the legacy of the volunteers of Year II and the military abilities of French citizen-soldiers. French victory at Valmy became the rationale for conscription laws across Europe in the following decades and served as the basis for a closer relationship between the military and society. Alan Forrest's book, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory, masterfully traces the evolution of the myths of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era through over 150 years of French and European military and political development. It stands as a concise single volume investigation of the nineteenth and twentieth century French political landscape and military affairs, as well as the ever-contested field of civil-military relations, expressed through a work centred on memory and myth.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Prussia