Sentiment vs Strategy: British Naval Policy, Imperial Defence, and the Development of Dominion Navies, 1911–14
This article examines British naval policy towards imperial defence and the development of autonomous Dominion navies in 1911–14. It shows that the Admiralty's main goal under the leadership of Winston Churchill was to concentrate British and Dominion warships in European waters, and ideally in the North Sea, to meet the German threat. Churchill's approach to naval developments in the Dominions was also shaped by his desire to fulfil the Cabinet's policy of remaining strong in the Mediterranean Sea. He made some concessions to sentiment in the Dominions, but his attempts to create a coherent imperial policy for the naval defence of Britain and its empire were ultimately unsuccessful. By 1914 it was clear that the Dominions would not provide the additional warships Britain required for the Mediterranean, and on the eve of war the Admiralty was beginning to prepare an imperial naval strategy that more accurately reflected the Empire's capabilities.
Geography, Technology, and British Naval Strategy in the Dreadnought Era
Abstract : In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the effective deployment of naval force had determined the outcomes of the great European wars of the 18th century. Many, if not most, readers believed that this historical survey was the basis of related major arguments that were applicable to the late 19th and 20th centuries. The first was that naval supremacy was the prerequisite to economic prosperity and international political preeminence. The second was that naval supremacy could be achieved only through the possession of large numbers of battleships, which were always to be kept together to be able to contain or destroy enemy battleship fleets. The notion of the naval supremacy of a single country based upon battleships united in accordance with the principle of concentration of force thus became identified as the essence of Mahanian strategic theory. In effect, geopolitical and naval operational strategic lines of argument were conflated into a recipe for policy that was supposed to be universally valid. Such an understanding of what were widely believed to be the two main components of Mahan's thinking, however, was seriously flawed. In the first place, Mahan actually believed that naval supremacy in his own time and in the future would be wielded by a transnational consortium of naval powers acting in defense of a global system of free trade to the mutual benefit of participating parties. Secondly, Mahan's treatment of the principle of concentration of force in his most popular book was heavily conditioned by the particular geographical circumstances of Great Britain and its empire. Thus, while the first proposition was addressed to the question of the nature of an international system, the second was to a very considerable degree concerned with the character of the naval security problem of a single state. The relationship between the two arguments was thus much weaker than has been supposed.
Police and Political Violence in the 1960s and 1970s: Germany and Italy in a Comparative Perspective
Notwithstanding the significant differences between the German and Italian police models (federal and civil vs. centralised and militarised), in both countries the confrontation with the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a profound impact on police conceptions and public order strategies. Police forces in some German federal states (West Berlin) followed a hard line until the late 1960s, while in others (Munich, Hamburg) reforms to the Weimar-centred police intervention tactics took place beginning in the early to mid-1960s. In Italy, traditional police conceptions and strategies remained largely unchanged and re-emerged in 1968. Here, a movement from within the police led to the demilitarisation and unionisation of the state police in 1981. In both countries, fighting left-wing terrorism in the 1970s stimulated technical modernisation and enhanced the centralisation of the police. In critical response to police tactics, in the late 1970s Germany police matters were increasingly perceived as a concern not only of the state but of civil society—even if policing remained a highly contested terrain. In Italy, such matters largely remained state concerns in which only politicians and internal security specialists were entitled to intervene.