The history of the attitude of the United States towards the spread of nuclear weapons has been one of continuous opposition, tempered now and then by the judgement of the government of the day as to whether in particular instances the exigencies of the moment outweighed the force of the general principle. The starting point or the rough first draft for the U.S. policy of hostility towards the spread of nuclear weapons is the Baruch Plan, presented in 1946 to the newly created United Nations Atomic Energy Commission by the U.S. representative on the Commission, Bernard M. Baruch. The Baruch Plan aimed to harmonise an anticipated widespread international interest in the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. President Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted a new anti-proliferation initiative at the end of 1953 in the form of Atoms for Peace. This chapter discusses U.S. policy on non-proliferation and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Partial Test Ban Treaty, counter-proliferation and U.S. President George W. Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative.

This chapter focuses on the properties of an ideal nuclear-weapon-free zone and compares it with actual nuclear-free zones. An ideal nuclear-free zone's job of work is never done and there is always a risk that the arrangement will fail to hold. This puts it on a par with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), but its narrower geographical scope than the NPT is both beneficial to the nuclear-free zone and a problem for it. It is beneficial in as much as resolving the multilateral security dilemma is on average easier the smaller the number of participants involved, but more difficult in that no grouping of states is an island, and the introduction of nuclear weapons into the zone from outside may be difficult to insure against. This chapter also looks at three non-armament treaties: the Antarctic Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, and the Seabed Treaty. Finally, it discusses nuclear-free zones under the treaties of Tlatelolco, Rarotonga, Pelindaba, and Bangkok, as well as the Rapacki Plan and the Korean Declaration.

This chapter examines the inter-relation of economic and cultural or symbolic inequalities, focusing on Nancy Fraser's work on ‘recognition and redistribution’. Fraser's work initially suggested a limited role for the ideal of equality: whereas equality provided a crucial language for the advancement of claims for economic redistribution, such language seemed to be out of place in claims for cultural or symbolic recognition. Fraser's assertion that diverse claims of justice can be best played out under the banner of what she calls parity of participation is to be welcomed. Such an ideal is clearly egalitarian, and also gestures towards an account of egalitarian citizenship. On the other hand, the usefulness of the recognition/redistribution framework is far from certain, and this signifies a failure, ultimately, to transcend the dualism between culture and economy. Instead, this chapter argues that a commitment to equal citizenship or parity of participation may be better served by a focus on oppression and hierarchy, categories which span these putative categories.

This chapter examines the concept of war and peace in ancient Greece. It explains that the Greek word for war, polemos, often retained the physical resonance of fighting, combat or battle and that the Greeks thought of war as an activity that the gods themselves engaged in and approved of. The ancient Greeks invoked a range of justifications for their actions in order to persuade themselves and others to overlook any ties of kinship or any formal agreements that had been made with their erstwhile foes. Internal differences about whether violence was the right option, or even over the causes of conflict, were as common then as they are in today's societies.

This chapter offers a meta-critical analysis of the extensive literature on the philosophical aspects of The Matrix Trilogy, exploring the theoretical assumptions that underpin general conceptions of the ways philosophical and filmic texts can be inter-related. Much of the writing on the trilogy offers the films one of two options: to be celebrated as accurate albeit derivative, or castigated for misrepresenting the original sources: good example or bad philosophy. Discussions of the ways in which the trilogy takes up Jean Baudrillard's work have been dominated by the question of fidelity to the 'original' source, usually Simulacra and Simulation. The chapter addresses the work of two key theorists: Thomas Wartenberg and Christopher Falzon, whose exchanges offer a detailed discussion of the ways in which philosophical and filmic texts might be inter-related.

This chapter examines John Rawls's theory of justice and compares it with T. H. Marshall's account of social citizenship. Like Marshall, Rawls tried to integrate a concern for economic equality into the framework of liberal citizenship. As such, both accounts represent attempts to heal the dualism of what Karl Marx called bourgeois citizenship. The central problematic of Marshall's account was ‘how to reconcile the formal framework of political democracy with the social consequences of capitalism as an economic system'. Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), seemed to share the widespread hope of mid-century social welfare politics that political strategies could ameliorate the hardship of the worst off without destroying the principle of productive labour’. Rawls's account recalls the aspirations of the post-war consensus, a corporatist dream where citizens would avoid conflict by accommodating themselves to the inevitable but essentially productive nature of inequality. Both Rawls and Marshall offer wholly inadequate accounts of inequalities organised around race and sex, and both inexcusably neglect the global inequalities which sustained the social citizenship regime of the rich West.

This chapter focuses on the central issues concerning citizen politics. Adopting an empirical approach, it presents a typology of different forms of citizen politics, from activities initiated by the people themselves to actions prompted by the elites; similarly, citizen politics can be divided into conservative or progressive effects. Based on this typology, this chapter examines different forms of politics.

This chapter focuses on the extent of party system change since the 'earthquake elections' of 1970-1973. In considering the extent of change, it seems useful to separate out three analytically distinct elements of party systems, their size, structure and dynamics. Social structural change has undercut the relative size of the Social Democrats' 'natural' electoral constituency. If changes in the size of the Scandinavian party systems are assessed in relation to the vote share of the three 'pole parties', the Social Democrats, the Agrarians/Centre and the Conservatives, there has been a mixture of 'core persistence' and change. Whilst from an electoral standpoint the Scandinavian party systems have exhibited heightened dimensionality, the structure of the legislative party systems has been predominantly unidimensional. The changing dynamics of the legislative party system involves focusing on three things, the interaction of the parliamentary parties, the nature of legislative majority-building and the structure of party competition.

This chapter focuses on the executive-parties dimension and in particular on two striking differences in the nature of the political executive across the Nordic region. First, there is the contrast, in Arend Lijphart's terms, between the executive-legislative balance systems of the 'metropolitan' Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the executive dominant systems of Finland and Iceland. Second, there is the contrast, in Maurice Duverger's terms, between the semi-presidential systems of Finland and Iceland and the parliamentary governments in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The chapter examines whether a fundamental convergence across the region has witnessed the emergence of prime minister-dominant parliamentary executives. In contrast to Richard Rose, the leadership role of the prime minister and the increased importance and power of the office have been emphasised in the Scandinavian literature.

The single factor which distinguished the Victorian temperance movement from the raft of anti-drink activity that preceded it was the emergence of organised temperance societies. That is, local, and later national, associations whose defining feature was their goal of reducing or eradicating alcohol consumption across society. Evangelicalism was spreading the message of organised social and moral reform at the same time as increasing numbers of individuals who were publicly mooting the idea of partial or even total abstinence from alcoholic drinks. However, it was the ‘fusion of the idea of association with the idea of abstinence’ which was needed to kick-start the temperance campaign. In post-colonial America, as in Hanoverian England, alcohol consumption tapped into deep-set concerns about both freedom and national identity. Organised teetotalism was a revolutionary idea, especially among the working class. It was after the teetotallers conjured up their vision of a sober millennium that it became possible to think about entirely new levels of social and political freedom as being achieved through sobriety.

By 1918, the drink question in England had been transformed. The establishment of the Central Control Board (CCB) had shown that it was possible to impose central planning on the drinks trade. The CCB had encouraged leading brewers to work with the government in setting alcohol policy, rather than viewing legislation as a perennial threat. Levels of overall beer consumption had plummeted, from an average annual consumption of 214 pints per person at the start of the century to just 80 by the time of World War I. Beer was more expensive, it was weaker, and pubs faced unprecedented levels of competition from new forms of entertainment such as the cinema and organised sports. The most significant response to the post-war malaise within the brewing industry was driven by two brewing companies who had been closely involved with the work of the CCB: Whitbread, and Mitchells and Butlers. This chapter explores drinking places and popular culture in Britain, beer and Britishness, temperance movement, market forces, the consolidation of the brewing industry, and the development of new drinks.

This chapter examines the legend of disintegration, one of the most politically influential expressions of the notion of political Englishness, which charts England's loss of supposed self-possession. It traces the influence of this legend in the debate about English identity and explains that this narrative synthesises two apparently contradictory developments: nationalism; and a new, post-imperial, global framework for politics. The wide appeal of this legend can be attributed to the fact that it provided a compelling explanation of British circumstances in the late twentieth century. In this legend, the English idiom represented nothing but the suffocation of political and cultural possibilities.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the sex and moral agenda of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. The result indicates that Bush's emphasis on broad moral principles helped in rallying Republican supporters, and that his approach to moral politics reaped electoral rewards. The chapter explains the role of moral issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion in mobilising electoral support and in encouraging turnout among white Protestant evangelicals. It discusses the 2004 presidential election exit polls, revealing that 22 per cent of voters saw moral values as the most important issue facing the nation, and another survey which found that 27 per cent chose moral values as the principal issue determining the way in which they voted.