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"Soldiers -- Great Britain -- Attitudes"
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War, Identity and the Liberal State
This book critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states. Drawing on original field-research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how their everyday experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpins power relations in the military, but the geopolitics of wars waged by liberal states. Linking the politics of daily life to the international is an intervention into international relations (IR) and security studies because instead of overlooking the politics of the everyday, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested by it. By utilising insights from Michel Foucault, the book explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against 'illiberal' ones in pursuit of global peace and security. The book also develops post-structural work in international relations by urging scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which bodies, objects and architectures also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood.
eBook
Soldier Repatriation
Soldier repatriation from Afghanistan has impacted debate about the war. This study highlights this impact with particular focus on Britain, Denmark and Germany. All three countries deployed soldiers soon after the 9/11 attacks, yet their role in Afghanistan and the casualty rates suffered, have been vastly different. This book looks at how their casualties influenced the framing of the war by analysing the political discourse about the casualties, how the media covered the repatriation and the burials, and how the dead were officially recognised and commemorated. Explaining how bodies count is not done exclusively by focusing on the political leadership and the media in the three countries, the response from the men and women in Afghanistan to the official framing of the war is given particular weight. Martinsen contributes to our understanding of European strategic culture by showing how countries respond to the same security challenges.
eBook
The First World War soldier and his contemporary image in Britain
The image of the First World War soldier as a cowed victim, caught in the grip of a meaningless, industrialized war, is one that has become entrenched in the British popular imagination. It was not, however, the image that dominated public discussion of the soldier between 1914 and 1918. This article seeks to examine how the portrayal of the soldier changed during and after the First World War and proposes that the victimized soldier motif has been reinforced today by the coalescence of three trends. The first is the growth of the family history industry that encourages an individualized and empathetic approach to the First World War. The second trend is concerned with an increasing public interest in psychological reactions to war. Since the Vietnam War, there has been a growing expectation that soldiers will be psychologically damaged by wartime experience. This has influenced the public perception of the First World War soldier, affecting, in particular, the discussion surrounding those executed for military crimes during the conflict. Finally, the article argues that long-term changes in British attitudes to the use of force, coupled with the experience of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, have also coloured the way in which the First World War is portrayed. A range of interest groups have cast the contemporary British soldier as a victim in recent years and the article argues that the explicit linking of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with the First World War has reinforced this victim image for each conflict.
Journal Article
Danny Boy
The true story of a young soldier's journey from hero to alleged war criminal, the determined lawyer on his tail and their search for truth in the fog of war. Brian Wood is among several British soldiers accused of committing war crimes after a specific engagement in Iraq, the so-called Battle of Danny Boy. The allegations call into question Brian's memories, his actions and the example he wants to set to his wife Lucy, sons Bailey and Charlie, and his former soldier dad Gavin. With tenacious human rights lawyer Phil Shiner investigating the actions of British personnel, Brian is forced to re-examine everything he remembers about that day and everything he has experienced as a soldier. Memory, evidence and trauma collide on the fine line between war and unlawful killing in a legal and moral conflict that stretches from the battlefield at Checkpoint Danny Boy to one of Britain's largest ever public inquiries, the Al-Sweady Inquiry. Will Brian be able to look his family in the eye and be the husband, father and son they need him to be?
Streaming Video
Illicit Encounters: Female Civilian Fraternization with Axis Prisoners of War in Second World War Britain
The arrival of enemy prisoners of war in Britain from 1941 onwards and their use as a labour force in the hard-pressed British war economy meant that they came into increasing contact with civilians as the scope of their employment widened. Their deployment into labour battalions and billeting on farms meant that they had day-to-day contact with many women as well as men. This article charts the attempts by government agencies to limit civilian fraternization with both Italian and later German prisoners of war both during and after the war through the enforcement of defence regulations and other relevant legislation – showing how difficult this proved to be as circumstances changed and demonstrating that public perceptions of the prisoners changed after 1945 and how this was belatedly followed by relaxation of the relevant legislation. It also places government and public attitudes to fraternization within the contemporary debates on declining female morals and draws some comparisons with scholarship on women's relations with foreign allied soldiers in the same period.
Journal Article
ENGLISH RUGBY UNION AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
The idea that war was a football match writ large was commonly expressed in Britain during the First World War. This article looks at the attitudes and actions of the English Rugby Football Union and its supporters before, during, and after the First World War to examine how such beliefs were utilized by sports organizations and the impact they had on the military and on society as a whole. Rugby union football was viewed both by its supporters and general observers alike as the most enthusiastic and committed sporting supporter of the war effort; the article explores rugby's overtly ideological stance as a means of shedding light on broader discussions about the cultural impact of the war, such as in the works of Paul Fussell and Jay Winter, and about the continued survival of traditional and Edwardian ideas of patriotism among the English middle classes in the immediate post-war period.
Journal Article
The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917-18
Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives or its complex historical consequences, the campaign in Palestine during the first world war was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Keen to capitalize on the romantic appeal of victory in the Holy Land, British propagandists repeatedly alluded to Richard Coeur de Lion's failure to win Jerusalem, thus generating the widely disseminated image of the 1917-18 Palestine campaign as the 'Last' or the 'New' Crusade. This representation, in turn, with its anti-Moslem overtones, introduced complicated problems for the British propaganda apparatus, to the point (demonstrated here through an array of official documentation, press accounts and popular works) of becoming enmeshed in a hopeless web of contradictory directives. This article argues that the ambiguity underlying the representation of the Palestine campaign in British wartime propaganda was not a coincidence, but rather an inevitable result of the complex, often incompatible, historical and religious images associated with this particular front. By exploring the cultural currency of the Crusading motif and its multiple significations, the article suggests that the almost instinctive evocation of the Crusade in this context exposed inherent faultlines and tensions which normally remained obscured within the self-assured ethos of imperial order. This applied not only to the relationship between Britain and its Moslem subjects abroad, but also to rifts within metropolitan British society, where the resonance of the Crusading theme depended on class position, thus vitiating its projected propagandistic effects even among the British soldiers themselves.
Journal Article
Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War
The present paper examines the origin and socio-historical context of the Angels of Mons, a belief-legend that was a source of inspiration for British civilians and troops serving on the Western Front during the war of 1914-8. I trace the source of the legend to a fictional story that was in itself inspired by traditions of supernatural intervention in battle that were of great antiquity. During 1915 two versions, one based upon fiction and the other created from the cauldron of rumour and popular belief, became combined and transformed during oral transmission into a belief-legend that continues to survive in English folklore. My conclusion is that the Angel of Mons can only be interpreted within the context of what Fussell describes as a world of reinvigorated myth that appeared in the midst of a war characterised by industrialism and materialism (Fussell 1975, 115).
Journal Article
National Identity and Mentalities of War in Three EC Countries
It is a basic assumption of this article that the history, symbolism and mentality of war - e.g. in the form of heroism - constitute central elements in the make-up of national identities, also in the European Community, despite the fact that the EC is more commonly thought of as a peace movement. The contribution and significance of 'war mentality' may differ from one country to the next, however. The article examines the link between national identity and the mentality of war in Great Britain, (West) Germany and Denmark, as three EC countries representing different national histories, structures and ambitions. The approach is comparative and intercultural. The author argues (1) that the mentality of war is radically different in the three countries: one of proud and unifying civic heroism in Britain, of traumatic negative presence in Germany and of symbolic moral strength based on historical defeats in Denmark; (2) that these differences are mainly rooted in (the outcome of) World War II and conform with general patterns of political culture in the three countries concerning the link between nationalism and internationalism; and (3) that this makes for very different attitudes to closer political cooperation in a 'European Union', particularly as regards integration in the areas of common security and defence policies. Attitudes to the Gulf War are used as a concrete case to demonstrate some of the salient points. The article concludes by pointing out the difficulties in unifying European nationalisms so dissimilar in this decisive area of national identity, and in permanently keeping the military option out of intra-European national competition.
Journal Article