Byron's satire of Robert Southey's Vision of Judgment, a Poet Laureate elegy and political settling of scores, upends Southey's Tory preening with liberal political satire, but also supplements this anti-type with unexpected twinning, especially against the unnamed figure of pure principle, the pseudonymous Junius.

This chapter discusses Canto III of Childe Harold and Manfred as marking a turning point in Byron’s writing career. Together, these two works detached Byron from the tragic universe of the Tales and pointed him towards the comic world of Don Juan. Childe Harold III turns from exploring the devastating trauma of painful memory – the Byronic Hero’s, the poet’s and post-Napoleonic Europe’s – to a quest for ways of forgetting pain through the imagination and communing with the natural world. Through these it finds a path into renewed, and new forms of, vitality, though these ultimately prove temporary and the return to the memory of pain inevitable. However, Manfred takes up Childe Harold III’s quest to discover the power of memory itself to console, comfort and revitalise. The result is a new, self-conscious, wilful, and appreciative acquiescence in the flow, and contrary flowings, of his own consciousness – indeed, his existence per se – even as he approaches his death. This prepares the way for Don Juan’s wholesale embrace of the spontaneous vitality, but also impermanence, of all human impulse(s) – an embrace that is fundamental to Byron’s comic vision.

This chapter argues that Byron is famous as a leading figure in Romantic poetry, but his own allegiance was to eighteenth-century culture. I argue that on the one hand he confirms the distinction between the two and yet he also overturns it. This is because he enters so deeply into the contradictions and character of eighteenth-century culture that he is part of their generation of something different. In this he resembles Burke’s deep relation to Whig culture and Newman’s to the Church of England, both of whom by this brought about the transformation of what they revered into something new and yet sourced in the past. I argue that is bound up with a larger historical transition between judging actions as open possibilities and accepting behaviour as an unalterable given. Byron is, as he claimed to be, an ethical poet because his attention is primarily to the former of these.

With his ironic distance and skepticism, Byron often appears to be our contemporary. But is he, or have we remade him in our image? Byron’s life poses this quintessential problem for biography, as the term ‘Byron’ has become the site of artistic and intellectual speculations, and of repeated moral and ethical struggles, as well as continued debate over what really happened. Byron himself believed in the truth of historical record, but he also revelled in the way the imagination shapes reality. His literary personae reify this dual commitment, from Childe Harold to Don Juan. Byron's own story is, like theirs, a tale of self-questioning and of self-forming, mirroring the way in which the art of biography itself has undergone questioning and reinvention. To read and absorb the many biographies of Byron is to trace the development of the contemporary biographical mode, with its meticulous research, its psychological sophistication, and its awareness that imagination as much as fact is required to begin to understand another human being. In this, as it so often seems to turn out, Byron got there before us.

Two main lines of Romantic address descend from the Romantic period, the one – long dominant – identified with Lyrical Ballads, the other with Byron. The conventions of the dominant line are the critical focus of the Byronic line, which was forecast in William Blake and which was adopted and adapted by Pushkin, Lermontov, Heine, Poe, Baudelaire, and Lautréamont.

This chapter assesses the enduring relationship between the military role of the United States in Europe, through its participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and European integration from the Cold War to the present. It argues that, during the Cold War, western European security cooperation was conceived as part of a wider endeavour, which also included the United States and Canada. Also after the end of the East--West division, diverging priorities among the European countries and their preference for intergovernmental rather than supranational cooperation, together with US determination to preserve the transatlantic alliance, bolstered NATO’s role as the bedrock of European defence, while confining the role of European institutions to the range of peacekeeping and crisis management tasks. After reviewing the current state of the art of research on European security and defence, the chapter proceeds as follows. The first section focuses on the relationship between transatlantic and European security in the late 1940s, showing how western Europe’s security initiatives, such as the Dunkirk Treaty and the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO), endeavoured to secure a US pledge against the Soviet threat rather than to foster defence integration in Europe. The second section debates the project of a European Defence Community (EDC) in the early 1950s, emphasising diverging west European perceptions of the EDC and of West German rearmament. More specifically, France viewed the EDC mostly as an intergovernmental toolbox to control the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), rather than a truly supranational organisation. This section also argues that the British declined to participate, dreading the prospect of undermining NATO. After the EDC’s failure in 1954, the creation of the Western European Union (WEU) unequivocally left west European defence under the US umbrella.

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

The age of Atlantic revolutions brought hope for fundamental change, a scarce good in the early modern world. Change was achieved through the creation and legal incorporation of rights, which differed from privileges, as they transcended all structures of authority and were thus common to humankind. Yet inequalities persisted, especially inequality of property and religion. What did change was the ability to voice one’s opinion. Slogans used in national debates were utilized by people across social boundaries in countless local settings to express their political views or personal interests. This instrumentalization in turn reverberated on the national level. To succeed in achieving political goals, the mobilization of public opinion became indispensable. Likewise, revolutionaries agreed that the regimes they built had to be supported by some form of popular control over the government. But the actual people – rather than the abstract one that was a source of legitimacy – was feared nonetheless. Most new regimes were republics, while royalists tended to uphold the status quo or pursue their goals without overthrowing the government, although royalism did not necessarily denote a progressive or conservative ideology.

This chapter deals with the importance of the Cortes of Cádiz from several perspectives. In the first place, it considers its role in the history of Hispanic and Western liberalism. Secondly, it covers its Atlantic dimension, that is, the larger geographical and ideological context in which it took place. Thirdly, it delves into the role the Cortes played in the history of Spanish America, not only through the participation of the numerous Spanish American deputies that participated in the assembly during the four years during which it was in place, but also regarding its application and influence on several of the territories that had constituted the Spanish empire in America for almost three centuries. Considering all the aforementioned elements, the author gives a fairly complete idea of the importance of the Cortes de Cádiz in historical, political, and intellectual terms. Taken altogether, the chapter suggests that the last of the Atlantic revolutions (that is, the Peninsular liberal revolution that Cádiz represents, along with the Spanish American independence movements) has not received the historiographic attention it deserves; a situation that has changed in the last couple of decades.

The treaties establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) contained, from their very beginning, the possibility of enlarging the initial number of six member states. Article 98 ECSC provided that ‘[a]ny European State may request to accede to the present Treaty’ and laid down the enlargement procedure. When the EEC and Euratom Treaties were concluded in 1958, no ECSC enlargements had occurred. The main elements of the enlargement procedure of Article 98 ECSC would not only remain the principal features of the accession provision in the EEC Treaty (Article 237) and Euratom Treaty (Article 205), but also continue to be the key references in the unique accession provision in later versions of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).

It is tempting to interpret the convoluted narrative that led to Brexit as a story of British exceptionalism. The fit between European integration and the United Kingdom (UK) had never been easy – much less natural, it would appear, than for any other country in Europe. It was for this reason that the British initially stood aside from the process, spurning repeated chances to join the institutional precursors to the European Union (EU). When they did belatedly change their mind and join the European Economic Community (EEC), moreover, they did so amid sustained domestic controversy. The deep-seated mismatch between Britain and its European partners was to become a leitmotiv of the country’s forty-six years as an EC/EU member state. The UK was never at ease within the EC/EU, but instead at odds with important aspects of the process, divided internally on the necessity of membership and liable to see itself as an ‘awkward partner’, the malcontent within.

In December 1789 the Belgians won their independence from Austria. Belgian revolutionaries cast Austrian Emperor Joseph II as a foreign tyrant. Two years before, the Estates of the nine Belgian provinces led by lawyer Henri van der Noot had resisted Austrian-imposed reforms of their religious institutions and judicial administration. Pamphlets flew, not only defending rights guaranteed by centuries-old Belgian provincial constitutions, but arguing that Belgians should follow the Americans and fight for the natural rights. In October 1789, revolutionaries came together to issue the “Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon,” modeled on the American Declaration of Independence. An army of volunteers marched into battle supported by villagers. Taking advantage of a ten-day armistice to regroup, the Belgians overcame the Austrian forces and proclaimed their independence.