Wilsonianism also accentuated another latent split in American thought on international affairs. Did America have any security interests it needed to defend regardless of the methods by which they were challenged? Or should America resist only changes which could fairly be described as illegal? Was it the fact or the method of international transformation that …
In 1908, Roosevelt acquiesced to the Japanese occupation of Korea because, to his way of thinking, Japanese-Korean relations had to be determined by the relative power of each country, not by the provisions of a treaty or by international law: “Korea is absolutely Japan’s. To be sure, by treaty it was solemnly covenanted that Korea …
Europe was thrown into balance-of-power politics when its first choice, the medieval dream of universal empire, collapsed and a host of states of more or less equal strength arose from the ashes of that ancient aspiration. When a group of states so constituted are obliged to deal with one another, there are only two possible …
In other words, a person who lives in P-time will suggest a general approximate meeting slot in the coming future without nailing down the exact moment that meeting will take place. When I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana (a P-time culture), I used to feel puzzled that a local teacher at my …
Baron was working for Michelin in Clermont Ferrand, France, as part of a global team whose other members were located mainly in the United Kingdom. Baron recalls: My British colleagues were not reading many of my e-mails, especially the most important ones. It was starting to annoy me. I liked my British colleagues a lot, …
…taken aback when his American boss told him, ‘In your next presentation, get right to the point. You lost their attention before you even got to the important part.’ Hupert was unsure. ‘These are intelligent people,’ he thought. ‘Why would they swallow my argument if I haven’t built it carefully for them from the ground …
For many years I worked with Amihan Castillo, a lawyer and business professor from the Philippines who’d come to work in Europe following a highly successful career in Manila. Unfortunately, her opinions went unnoticed when working with our European team because she was so careful to downgrade any criticisms she made of proposals and projects. …
When Chinese vaguely express an idea or an opinion, the real message is often just implied. They expect their conversational partner to be highly involved and to take an active role in deciphering messages, as well as in mutually creating meaning. In Chinese culture, pang qiao ce ji [beating around the bush] is a style …
It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Russian archaeologists, ethnographers and orientalists began to take a serious interest in the Mongols and their influence. Archaeological excavations showed that Sarai had not been a settlement of tents, as imagined by the Russians until then, but a large medieval city of 75,000 people …
Through Byzantium the Russians were connected to the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Romanians, all affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Through its broader links to Christendom, they also entered into closer contact with Europe, becoming conscious of themselves as Europeans belonging to a common faith. As Obolensky put it, ‘Byzantium was not a wall …