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It is debatable whether the EU passed this test.[5] Although the EU could not be accused of moral indifference during the Yugoslav wars, its civilian power status represented a serious handicap. The first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was prompted by the flight of Ukraine's President, Viktor Yanukovych, following mass protests triggered by his last-minute refusal to sign the EU Association Agreement - on Moscow's orders. The EU objective may not be a regime change in Russia, but this does not make the regime change any less likely if things go badly for Putin in Ukraine. However, in the case of Ukraine, the EU cannot just hide behind I Uncle Sam i , because the war is on its borders, and the EU was directly involved from early on. [Extracted from the article]

For decades, historians have traced the disappointing performance of the Italian Air Force—the Regia Aeronautica—during the Second World War to technological backwardness, aircraft shortages, poor infrastructure and deficiency in doctrine. In addition to these problems, however, there was also a shortage of personnel. Analysing the development and management of the Italian Air Force during the 1920s and 1930s, this article shows how the lack of personnel was chronic throughout the interwar period and proved to be a key factor in the Regia Aeronautica’s poor preparedness for war with major powers in summer 1940. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes to the growing debate on parliamentary war powers and shows how parliaments matter in shaping both force deployment and force employment. Through original analysis of the Italian and German decision-making on military interventions after the Cold War, the article illustrates how formal and informal constraints shape the opportunity structures faced by executives that are willing to undertake military interventions. Revisiting, and building on, the great deal of research recently emerged on institutional constraints to the use of force, the article details the types of costs – namely, transaction and audience costs – linked to involvement of legislatives in the decision-making and provides empirical support for theories based on parliamentary war powers, adding new dimensions of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars argue that institutions in democracies constrain leaders and prevent international conflict. However, many democracies specify rules of governance in times of emergency that divert substantial power to the head of state. The manipulation of these "emergency powers" provides a rational motivation for conflict. Using a novel data set of emergency provisions within democracies, I test the relationship between emergency power strength and conflict propensity using several steps to achieve causal inference, including an instrumental variable analysis that exploits the specificity of the state's constitution as a plausibly exogenous determinant of emergency power strength. I find that emergency power strength is a strong predictor of conflict onset in democracies in each test and that states with strong emergency powers are substantially more likely to enact a state of emergency due to an international conflict. I conclude with a discussion of my findings and avenues of future research using these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US presidents have routinely ordered the use of force without seeking prior authorisation from Congress. However, this practice does not mean that the legislature is irrelevant, as Congress often influences decisions by exercising informal political levers. One of the most important is through Congress’ ability to affect popular support for the commander-in-chief. Through a pair of experiments embedded on nationally representative opinion surveys, this article evaluates whether Congress’ constitutional prerogatives in war powers remain relevant when battling the president in the public sphere. Policy criticism significantly decreased support for the use of force, as did challenges to administration actions on constitutional grounds. Although Congress routinely fails to use the constitutional tools at its disposal to check the commander-in-chief, these powers bolster Congress’ capacity to influence public opinion. Hence, while presidents enjoy considerable leeway in the military arena, Congress’ capacity to erode public support can serve as a check on presidential power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that there is a need to question whether parliamentary involvement actually leads to the intended effects of increased democratic deliberation and responsiveness. We compare the unintended consequences of parliamentary votes on the use of force in two ‘most-different cases’: Canada and Germany. Despite substantive differences in the formal war powers of their parliaments, we find that military deployment votes on Afghanistan led to less democratic deliberation and responsiveness. Applying rationalist institutionalism, we argue that the deployment votes incentivised major parties to collude together to lessen debate on the Afghan mission, despite increasing public opposition and media attention. Rather than enhancing deliberation and responsiveness, as assumed by proponents of greater parliamentary involvement in military decisions, these parliamentary votes effectively diminished the willingness of parties to debate the mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain’s parliament has historically lacked formal war powers. Since 2003, however, MPs have voted five times on military action, including famously vetoing intervention in Syria in 2013. A new convention developed that—regardless of the legal position—governments should permit the House of Commons the opportunity to veto certain military deployments. This article explores what we now know—and what we do not—about the British War Powers Convention. It identifies apparent exceptions, including non-combat, Special Forces and drone operations. It highlights areas lacking clarity: for example, who decides what constitutes an ‘emergency’? It argues that most governments probably will allow the House of Commons to have its say before using force abroad, that a government politically able to bypass MPs without punishment need not fear involving them, while one unable to win support will be punished for avoiding a vote. Finally, the article considers the implications, both positive and negative, of parliamentary war powers for Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While parliaments have long been neglected actors in the analysis of security policy, a research literature on the subject is growing. Current research is focused primarily on how parliaments, relying on formal legal competences, can constrain governmental policies. However, this research needs expansion in three areas. First, informal sources of parliamentary influence on security policy deserve more systematic attention as the significance of parliaments often hinges on contextual factors and individual decision-makers. Second, we still lack a systematic understanding of the effects of parliamentary involvement on security policy. Finally, the role of parliaments for the politics of security is almost completely uncharted territory. When parliaments become involved in security policy, does it foster transparency and contribute to the politicisation of security policy so that security policy becomes a ‘normal’ political issue? The article reviews current research, derives findings from the contributions to this Special Issue, and spells out their wider implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The parliamentarization of military deployments is a burgeoning area of study but has tended to neglect the peculiar cases of legislatures deprived of any war powers. This article contributes to this literature by examining the curious case of Canada. Since Canadian governments are not required to secure parliamentary support to deploy the military, it analyzes why they occasionally have and increasingly do. We propose and test four hypotheses to explain why and when governments willingly choose to involve parliament in war decisions absent constitutional or legal obligation to do so: executive ideology, mission risk, minority parliament, and blame shifting. Our findings suggest that ideology and mission risk have the strongest explanatory and predictive power for when the executive will invite the legislature to vote on a military deployment in Canada. While the desire to avoid blame may contribute to the decision to hold a vote, this is not as influential or statistically relevant. The association between holding a vote and being in a minority parliament, for its part, is negligible and statistically insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the level of general principle, representative democracy is appealed to by the EU institutions and member states alike. Yet in today's Europe it risks being marginalised amidst the actions and rhetoric of emergency - a norm to be waived in a state of exception, leaving decisions of lasting consequence shielded from public debate. A German constitutional theorist once famously defined as sovereign the one who has the power to declare the state of exception, and linked this power closely to executive suspensions of the law. The European setting invites a different understanding of an emergency regime: one that is manifest in the contravention of norms which may or may not be legally codified, and which is collectively produced by multiple actors. The persistence of politics in the emergency register indicates precisely the weakness of political authority. The article goes on to examine how exceptional this exceptionalism is. Is Europe's emergency politics a recent phenomenon, or has it been one of the currents of European integration from the beginning? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Orwell's initial response to wartime internment is characterised by his silence. Uncertainty, desire for government work, wartime necessity, political prejudice and faith in English reasonableness contributed to his toleration of the policy, in the specific context of total war. Orwell worried that criticising internment could undermine public trust in civil liberties, which performatively protected England from the excesses of totalitarianism. Unlike others on the Left, he therefore placed his faith not in the vigilance of parliament, but in an illusion embraced by the English people: that they remained guardians of civil liberties, despite a need in wartime to curtail them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary oversight of the military constitutes an important element of the civilian control of the armed forces. However, the strength of parliaments in this realm varies greatly across democracies and little is known about the sources of this variation. We propose an explanation for one key aspect of this variation: why does parliament enjoy veto power over military deployments in some democracies but not in others? Our analysis of data from forty-nine democracies around the world suggests that at least three factors account for parliamentary strength or weakness in this realm: the external threat to which a country is exposed, its constitutional tradition, and the experience of severe military failure in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerability through either avoidance or exploitation. The behavior of US adversaries is thought to critically affect the president’s opportunities to use force. Conventional and strategic accounts of the linkage between domestic political vulnerability and the use of force provide contradictory expectations. To assess these theories we identify hypotheses related to four dependent and selection variables corresponding to dispute initiation and reciprocation involving the US. These hypotheses are tested with a two-stage Heckman Probit model to account for selection effects due to strategic interaction. The results are most supportive of orthodox diversionary theory. Our findings challenge the other perspectives evaluated—the strategic conflict avoidance (SCA) perspective, Howell and Pevehouse’s party cover approach, and Schultz’s signaling model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article probes the relationship among constitutionalism, extra-legal prerogative power, and citizen judgment. While much has been written about the nature of Lockean prerogative, and while his theory serves as a direct inspiration for contemporary "normative extra-legalists," key participants in the debate over emergency powers, less attention has been paid to how the people judge prerogative. Attention to this issue is useful because an examination of the process of political judgment of extra-legalism in Locke leads to a complication of the current extra-legalist vision of democratic mechanisms of accountability. The author argues that the extra-legal approach is right to consider the role of democratic publics in potentially constraining the exercise of emergency powers but wrong to formulate that role as one extra-constitutional power checking another extra-constitutional power. The author situates both prerogative power and citizen judgment of it at the threshold of the constitutional order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent are political leaders entitled to violate embedded moral and legal rules in response to national emergencies? Do they have a duty to do so? This article assesses two prominent liberal approaches to this question. The ‘dirty hands’ thesis insists that there is a radical separation between private and public ethics and that the latter may require the commission of acts prohibited by the former. A ‘lesser evil’ approach holds that leaders may even violate the more permissive public ethics if there is a consequentialist case for doing so. Both suggest to some extent that certain acts remain wrong but may be necessary nonetheless. While this position makes good philosophical sense, it makes little political sense. In practice, societies choose either to validate or reject the legitimacy of certain acts. This article aims to overcome this problem by suggesting a new way of thinking about the way that ‘dirty hands’ and ‘lesser evil’ ethics work in practice through Ian Clark's work on legitimacy. It argues that in particular cases actors evaluate between competing political, ethical and legal claims, a point illustrated by a brief case study on the torture debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of the problem of emergency powers often assume that norms and exceptions constitute its conceptual structure. This perspective is both self-undermining and dangerous. Because even the critics of emergency powers often rely on this dichotomy clarifying the conceptual terrain might contribute to the development of a safer approach to emergencies. Hence, this article explores the origins and logic of modern exceptionalism by examining instances of its careful articulation in the history of political thought: in the "republican" exceptionalism of Machiavelli and Rousseau and the "decisionist" exceptionalism of Schmitt and Hobbes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the increasingly prevalent idea that since September 11, 2001, we have moved into a state of permanent emergency and an abandonment of the rule of law. The article questions this idea, showing that historical developments in the twentieth century have actually placed emergency powers at the heart of the rule of law as a means of administering capitalist modernity. This suggests we need to rethink our understanding of the role of emergency measures in the "war on terror" and, more generally, to reconsider the relationship between the rule of law and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To supervise its international neutrality commitments during the First World War, the Dutch government invoked the emergency powers of the 1899 War Law, imposing a 'state of war' or 'siege' in 75% of the country's municipalities, which subsequently witnessed extraordinary military interference in their daily affairs. Implementing the War Law proved confusing, controversial and complex. To impose uniformity, the government and judiciary repeatedly limited its application, ultimately altering the legislation's 'need breaks law' justification. That the War Law was used for a protracted length of time illustrated that, even though neutral, the Netherlands remained a nation in fear of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether constitutional interpretations of the proper roles of the executive and the legislative branches influence Congress members' voting decisions on use of force votes. Specifically, the authors examine the hypothesis that some members are presidentialists--those whose constitutional interpretations favor the executive--and others are congressionalists--those whose constitutional interpretations defend congressional prerogatives. We examined members of Congress who served continuously in either the US House of Representatives or the US Senate from 1990-1999. We identified possible congressionalists and presidentialists using all roll call votes of resolutions to authorize the use of force, and examined floor speeches in the Congressional Record to see how these members explained their votes. We conclude some members of Congress do take constitutional interpretations into account when casting these votes, and justify their actions based upon their reading of the Constitution. Thus, they shape congressional debate and voting outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issues that prompted the passing of the War Powers Act will continue to bedevil us again if Congress does not prepare to meet the future with seriously asserted procedures to regularize its relationship to the executive branch regarding a recourse of arms. There were unintended ambiguities and unforeseen exigencies in the original war powers legislation that have confounded systematic application of that act. Also inhibiting Congress has been an acceptance of an incorrect formula--that the War Powers Act "report" triggers the withdrawal of U.S. troops no later than 90 days after they were first committed. In fact, it is not the report that triggers the 90-day clock, but the military activity itself that starts the 90-day clock, irrespective of any report. An improved War Powers Act would require the executive to provide reports that are more timely and more extensive. It would rethink the obligation that troops return within 90 days. And it would compel more thorough consultations pursuant to any military undertaking. An improved war powers statute would come to grips with the "standing" of Congress in court and the financing of any proposed military undertaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents national-level findings pertaining to the basic stochastic patterns of war duration and severity, and determines the effects of power system membership on those patterns. The results have theoretical and empirical relevance to general contagion hypotheses of war and specific import to the negative addiction (or war-weariness) thesis. Among the principal findings are indications that irrespective of the characteristics of past or current war behavior, in the long run: (1) a nation that fights a war has more than a one-in-three probability of fighting for over two years and sustaining over 15,000 battle fatalities; (2) major powers are more likely to fight severe wars and less likely to fight moderate wars than are minor powers, whereas they are equally likely to fight small wars; (3) major powers and minor powers have roughly equiprobable chances of fighting wars at short, moderate, and long duration levels. It is concluded that power distinctions among nations have significant effects on long-term probability patterns of war severity but not on war duration. Regarding war-to-war linkages, the probable duration or severity of a nation's next war is unaffected by the duration or severity of its last war. In other words, there is no evidence indicating either a systematic increase or decrease in war-to-war cost-tolerance levels. Therefore, decisions on allocations of resources in current or future wars appear to be unaffected by the past: a nation's aggregate capability (i.e. power status)—not its antecedent experience—is a determinant of the scale of its wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of papers relevant to military policy. They include "The Constitution and the War Power: What Motivates Congressional Behavior?," "Drafting Community: Understanding the Fate of Conscription," "The Social Origins of the French Capitulation in Algeria," and "Legitimizing Force: A Lockean Account."

The article cogitates on the impact of the declaration of war between the U.S. and Germany on the relations of all the inhabitants of the country. Before the declaration, everybody had a right to discuss in private and in public the questions whether the U.S. should carry on war against Germany. However, the question of peace and war has become a matter that is being decided by the President and the Congress.

The article focuses on the recruitment of blacks in the War Department in the U.S. It stresses that color of man's skin will no longer be used as a basis for recruitment but its patriotism. The aspiring military officers are graduates of the so-called "colored Plattsburg" at Fort Des Moines. The negro troops will be under the supervision and command of the white officers.

Presents updates on the education community in the U.S. Success of the parades and pageants in New York City and up the Hudson in commemoration of Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton; Natural conservation policy of U.S. President Howard Taft; Preparation for the meeting between President Howard Taft and President Diaz at El Paso and Juarez.

The article focuses on the duties and pledges of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the World War II. Some Americans feel that Roosevelt is not sincere in his determination to keep the country out of war. There are leaders who demand that Roosevelt take the people into his confidence. The report of the Atlantic conference raises the suspicion that Roosevelt went beyond his rightful authority.

The article reports on a veto submitted by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to the House of Representatives concerning the wartime national prohibition enforcement bill which provides enforcement for the wartime prohibitions and for the adoption of the constitutional amendment. The President objects this prohibition act since it was only passed by reasons of war emergencies and that its purpose has already been satisfied during the demobilization of the army and navy.