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Interwar Years (interwar + year)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences85%

Selected Abstracts

The Middle Way: The Discourse of Planning in Britain, Australia and at the League in the Interwar Years,

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 1 2006
Joanne Pemberton
Through an examination of speeches, articles and scholarly writing, this article traces the development of the idea of planning and the related doctrine of rationalization in Australia, Britain and at the League of Nations up to the Second World War. These terms denoted scientific control of social forces, an idea that emerged as the major response to interwar perceptions of crisis. Although rationalization and planning were viewed as potentially international in scope by the League's Economic Section, their treatment in Britain and Australia tended towards the provincial, with the rhetoric surrounding them progressively being tailored to suit local and imperial concerns and commitments. The defences of planning often relied on sentimental appeals to British character and traditions, although these same appeals were later used to undermine its rhetorical status. [source]

Anti-drink driving reform in Britain, c. 1920,80

ADDICTION, Issue 9 2010
Bill Luckin
ABSTRACT Aim The goal of this report is to provide a framework for understanding and interpreting political, scientific and cultural attitudes towards drink driving in 20th-century Britain. Exploring the inherent conservatism of successive governments, Members of Parliament (MPs) and the public towards the issue during the interwar years, the contribution seeks to explain the shift from legislative paralysis to the introduction of the breathalyser in 1967. Design Based on governmental, parliamentary and administrative records, the report follows a mainly narrative route. It places particular emphasis on connections between post-war extra-parliamentary and parliamentary movements for reform. Setting The paper follows a linear path from the 1920s to the 1970s. Britain lies at the heart of the story but comparisons are made with nations,particularly the Scandinavian states,which took radical steps to prosecute drinking and dangerous drivers at an early date. Findings The report underlines the vital post-war role played by Graham Page, leading parliamentary spokesman for the Pedestrians' Association; the centrality of the Drew Report (1959) into an ,activity resembling driving'; the pioneering Conservative efforts of Ernest Marples; and Barbara Castle's consolidating rather than radically innovative activities between 1964 and 1967. Conclusion Both before and after the Second World War politicians from both major parties gave ground repeatedly to major motoring organizations. With the ever-escalating growth of mass motorization in the 1950s, both Conservative and Labour governments agonized over gridlock and ,murder on the roads'. Barbara Castle finally took decisive action against drink drivers, but the ground had been prepared by Graham Page and Ernest Marples. [source]

Place Annihilation and Urban Reconstruction: The Experience of Four Towns in Brittany, 1940 to 1960

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2000
Hugh Clout
Devastation, revival and reconstruction form guiding themes in this discussion of annihilated settlements in north-west France. For reasons of deep-water access and strategic location, the German occupiers decided to construct massive submarine bases at Brest, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire. Allied bombardment devastated the towns that surrounded them during the Second World War, while the heavily defended walled port of Saint-Malo was annihilated in 1944. With peace restored, prisoners of war and local labourers cleared mines, removed debris and installed large quantities of temporary housing. Development plans, drawn up in the interwar years, provided an important starting point for subsequent master plans which shaped postwar reconstruction. Working under the guidance of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism, chief planners, architects and reconstruction cooperatives refashioned property units and engineered the rebuilding of Brest, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire along thoroughly modern lines; by contrast, Saint-Malo was rebuilt much as it had been before the war. Many of the buildings of the 1950s now require refurbishment, and urgent initiatives need to be taken to revitalise the local economies of these reconstructed towns, whose role as naval bases, military arsenals and shipbuilding centres has contracted in the wake of political détente and deindustrialisation. [source]

F. L. McDougall: Éminence grise of Australian Economic Diplomacy

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 1 2000
Sean Turnell
This paper examines the principal economic ideas of F. L. McDougall, a largely forgotten, sometime government official and ,amateur' economist who exercised an enigmatic influence upon Australia's economic diplomacy in the interwar years. Beginning with his conception of ,sheltered markets', the international manifestation of the Bruce Government's vision for Australia of ,men, money, and markets', the paper explores McDougall's later advocacy of a ,nutrition approach' to world agriculture and its extension into ,economic appeasement'. McDougall's ideas were theoretically unsophisticated, and realized little in the way of immediate achievements. In the longer run they could be viewed more favourably. Naive perhaps and idealistic certainly, McDougall's ideas were part of a broader movement that, after the Second World War, redefined the role of international economic institutions. If nothing else, McDougall's active proselytizing of his ideas lent Australia an unusual ,voice' in international forums at a time when it was scarcely heard. [source]

An Australian Outlook on International Affairs?

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2009
The Evolution of International Relations Theory in Australia
Disciplinary histories of Australian International Relations (IR) theory have tended to focus on the 1960s , when a number of Australian scholars returned from the UK to take up posts at the Australian National University's Department of International Relations , as the beginning of a discipline that has subsequently flourished through various disciplinary debates and global events. This article offers a preliminary attempt at narrating a more complete history of Australian IR by beginning to recover much-neglected contributions made in the early interwar years. From these earliest years through to the current "era of critical diversity", it is argued, Australian scholars have made considerable contributions not just to the intellectual formation of an Australian outlook on international affairs, but to an understanding of international relations itself. [source]

The Breadwinner, his Wife and their Welfare: Identity, Expertise and Economic Security in Australian Post-War Reconstruction

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 4 2004
Ann Firth
The architects of Australian post-war reconstruction had learned from the experience of the Depression that subordinating the social order to economic objectives could have disastrous results. In Australia as elsewhere, interwar political and civic institutions were not sufficiently robust to protect society from the instability of a system based on the economically rational choices of individual entrepreneurs. High unemployment, which had characterised the interwar years and reached catastrophic levels in the Depression, convinced the architects of post-war reconstruction that new political institutions were necessary. The civil and political institutions they attempted to create were expressed in a particular anthropology constituted around their own identity as experts and the identities of the entrepreneur, the breadwinner and his wife. [source]

Social democracy and globalisation: the limits of social democracy in historical perspective

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2002
John Callaghan
This article argues that social democratic governments throughout the 20th century faced internal and international constraints arising from the operation of capitalist economies and that the evidence for a qualitative deepening of such constraints since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system is far from unequivocal. Financial markets were already big enough and fast enough to deter such governments from the pursuit of egalitarian policies in the interwar years or to destabilise them if they ignored the warning signs. This article also shows that the efficacy of Keynesian macroeconomic policy in the Golden Age has been exaggerated and that the problem of short,term movements of speculative capital persisted throughout this era in a country such as Britain. Keynesianism never worked in the face of mass unemployment and it is misleading to suggest that its breakdown in the 1970s somehow robbed social democracy of the policy tools that had maintained full employment in the 1950s and 1960s. A host of additional problems have indeed beset social democratic governments since 1973, but the analysis of such problems is hindered rather than helped by much of the literature which invokes economic globalisation. Globalisation theory is in need of further specification before it can be useful and arguments about the economic consequences of globalisation since 1973 need to distinguish its effects from those of the many conjunctural problems of the period as well as the policies that important agencies have pursued in search of solutions to them. [source]