Group items tagged

the problem of the succession in Spain became acute, since by the terms of Ferdinand’s will, Charles was to govern in Aragon and Castile together with his mother (who, however, suffered from a nervous illness and never reigned).

Making the most of their candidate’s German parentage and buying up German electoral votes (mostly with money supplied by the powerful Fugger banking family), Charles’s adherents had meanwhile pushed through his election as emperor over his powerful rival, Francis I of France.

Gradually, the other chief task of his reign also unfolded: the struggle for hegemony in western Europe. That goal was a legacy of his Burgundian forefathers, including his ancestor Charles the Bold, who had come to naught in his fight against the French Valois Louis XI. His great-grandfather’s quest was to become a fateful problem for Charles as well.

America’s decline relative to a rising China has sparked interest among academics about power shifts in the international order—whether they can happen peacefully and under what conditions; what precedents exist and what they tell us. Now comes an important book, Twilight of the Titans, by Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. McDonald, who use quantitative analysis of power transitions to analyze the problem. What they find provides a warning to a rising China, and a road map for a declining United States to regain its standing.

The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison called the problem “the Thucydides Trap,” in which the country in relative decline so fears the rise of a challenger that it chooses to go to war to prevent it. And while Allison’s book Destined for War has its detractors, it served the worthwhile purpose of drawing us all back to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars and sounding the alarm that U.S. policies designed to confront China risked accelerating American decline.

History has really seen only one peaceful hegemonic transition: Britain to the United States in the late 19th century. It remains an open question whether nuclear weapons will stabilize hegemonic transition.

Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire

In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain

In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain

with the overall aim of crippling or destroying Austria, France’s long-standing continental enemy

Frederick II of Prussia invaded Silesia, one of the richest Habsburg provinces. His army defeated the Austrians at Mollwitz in April 1741 and overran Silesia

an alliance with Bavaria and Spain and, later, with Saxony and Prussia against Austria

Louis succeeded to the throne upon the assassination of his father in May 1610

As part of her policy of allying France with Spain, she arranged the marriage (November 1615) between Louis and Anne of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king Philip III.

break the hegemony of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs

In 1620, following the defeat of Frederick V (the elector palatine, or prince, from the Rhineland who had accepted the crown of Bohemia when it was offered to him in 1618) and the Bohemians, Spanish troops from the Netherlands entered the “Winter King’s” hereditary dominions of the Rhenish Palatinate. Militarily, Spain was now in a favourable position to restart the war with the United Provinces at the expiration of the truce in 1621

Little was said about religion or even the king’s authority, while the protection of the overseas empire had become the central consideration in Spanish relations with the Dutch rebels.

Having decided on war, Olivares pursued a perfectly consistent strategy: communications between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands were to be kept open at all costs

failed in his attempt to establish complete Danish hegemony in the Baltic Sea area in the Seven Years’ War of the North

After joining his uncles John and Adolphus, dukes of the Danish provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, in June 1559 in conquering the peasant republic of Dithmarschen (now in Germany), Frederick succeeded his father, Christian III, in 1559 as king of Denmark and Norway.

Frederick hoped to take over Sweden and resurrect the Kalmar Union of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Spain thus established complete hegemony over all the Italian states except Venice, which alone maintained its independence.

Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia (which had all been dependencies of Aragon), as well as Milan, came under direct Spanish rule and owed their allegiance to the sovereign according to their own laws and traditions.

From the beginning of Philip II’s reign, Italian affairs, which had originally been administered by the Council of Aragon, were coordinated by a Council of Italy in Madrid. At this council, the three major states—Naples, Sicily, and Milan—were each represented by two regents, one Castilian and one native. Sardinia remained a dependency of Aragon.

On news sites like this one, in newspapers, and even on TV, Americans have been grappling with concepts that normally don't get mentioned outside of a comparative literature class or liberal arts college symposium: neocolonialism, white man's burden, paternalism.

Maybe this is a conversation that started with the decline of the Iraq war. A February 2003 poll estimated that nearly 60% of Americans supported an invasion. By May 2007, 61% said the U.S. should have stayed out. The lessons were about more than the limits of American power or the wisdom of this particular conflict (although those are both important), but, underneath all of the questions and national soul-searching, the first hints in a century of American dominance that maybe our power isn't always and necessarily a force of good

during the two weeks of wall-to-wall American media coverage of the Egyptian revolution, hardly 10 minutes of cable news could go by without someone mentioning U.S. support for Mubarak. Americans were rooting for Egyptian protesters but, at the same time, they were helping to prop up Mubarak by participating in an American system that proudly promotes American hegemony by backing guys like him. The big contradiction in how Americans see our role in the world, obvious for so long to people in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was finally becoming clear to us.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

The American Century, contends the historian Adam Tooze, began in 1916

In “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931,” Mr. Tooze identifies those struggles as the crucial moment when the Allies ran out of funds. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Federal Reserve to block additional loans by J.P. Morgan & Co. that would have kept the Allies going, because nothing, in his view, justified further slaughter.

Perceiving minimal differences in the two sides’ war aims, Wilson first offered mediation and then called for “peace without victory.”

implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.

the basic deal that traditional elites offered to the people at the inception of our political system: “As long as you let us call the shots, we will pretend to let you rule.”

Today, that deal is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and the reason is both unlikely and counterintuitive

Until a few decades ago, governments and big media companies enjoyed an oligopoly over the means of mass communication. As a result, they could set the standards of acceptable political discourse.

glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions

The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria

The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland

For centuries, indigenous countries have traditionally used many products that have been recently patented by companies in the United States. Biopiracy of traditional knowledge from India by the United States has occurred directly through the use of patent law, and indirectly, through economic power and cultural imperialism. Through this paper, I contend that the United States uses cultural and economic power in order to warrant acts of biopiracy of traditional knowledge through patents and western research.

Other corporations have also economically benefited from the use of stolen traditional knowledge, but pharmaceutical corporations have had the largest impact as seen through the lens of economic power.

Other Western countries have stolen and continue to steal traditional knowledge from India. However, this specific case study can demonstrate how U.S cultural hegemony has led to controversial patent law cases and the U.S value of economic power has negatively influenced India.

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II.China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan.India has embraced a virulent nationalism.Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history.And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.

The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged

Causes of the French Revolution 1. International: struggle for hegemony and Empire outstrips the fiscal resources of the state 2. Political conflict: conflict between the Monarchy and the nobility over the “reform” of the tax system led to paralysis and bankruptcy. 3. The Enlightenment: impulse for reform intensifies political conflicts; reinforces traditional aristocratic constitutionalism, one variant of which was laid out in Montequieu’s Spirit of the Laws; introduces new notions of good government, the most radical being popular sovereignty, as in Rousseau’s Social Contract [1762]; the attack on the regime and privileged class by the Literary Underground of “Grub Street;” the broadening influence of public opinion. 4. Social antagonisms between two rising groups: the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie 5. Ineffective ruler: Louis XVI 6. Economic hardship, especially the agrarian crisis of 1788-89 generates popular discontent and disorders caused by food shortages.

What is the psychological mechanism underpinning this resentment?

Democratic politicians and the media have struggled to enter the minds of Trump voters, who are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by “Stalinist orthodoxy.”

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.