The accusation of ‘thirteen wasted years’ was first levelled against the Conservatives by Labour in 1964 about the period in office since 1951. To gain perspective on the years 2010–24, we open with an acknowledged authority assessing progress in the last fourteen years compared to what was achieved then. Kellner’s chapter will aim to synthesise the charge made about the ‘thirteen wasted years’ (1951-64) narrative and build the foundations of the analytical approach for the rest of this book by considering what governments abroad, notably in Europe, were achieving at the same time.

Jimmy Carter had no clear aims upon entering office, and his first two years were characterized by drift and inflation. Carter failed to address the inflation and America’s other economic problems, which contributed to his election defeat in 1980. He innovated in American grand strategy by using human rights against totalitarian states. The 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan awakened Carter to the reality of the Soviet threat. He began arming the Afghan mujahideen and launched the rebuilding of America’s armed forces. He also secured the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt.

The existence of a Cosmic Microwave Background was theoretically predicted by George Gamow and his associates, but played no role in the accidental discovery of the 2.7 degree cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson while they were testing a new type of satellite communications antenna at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ. An earlier measurement of the cosmic microwave background at Bell Labs went unnoticed except by Russian scientists, who misunderstood the paper to be reporting a negative result. Meanwhile, not far away, Robert Dicke and his colleagues at Princeton University were building a radiometer to verify Dicke’s prediction that it might be possible to detect the microwave remnants of the big-bang. But they were beaten by Penzias and Wilson’s serendipitous Nobel Prize winning discovery that led to the final demise of the steady-state theory. An even earlier measurement of optical absorption lines by interstellar cyanogen gave the first clues to the existence of a cosmic background radiation, but its meaning was not recognized until after the 1965 experimental discovery of the microwave background at Bell Labs.

It was the departure from the pre-Armistice ‘contract’ with Germany that became the crucial issue – famously blamed on Lloyd George and Wilson alike in Keynes’s tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). In particular there was a crucial ‘breach of contract’ when the two leaders included war pensions as so-called ‘reparations’; and these were now demanded under a specifically drafted War Guilt Clause of the Treaty. Dulles subsequently admitted his own role in what he came to regard as the Treaty’s greatest failing. What Chapter 2 demonstrates, through a close reading of the published documentation, is that Dulles’s collaborator at each crucial stage was none other than Keynes himself.

At the Paris peace conference in 1919, Keynes served as a member of the British delegation. He often represented the Treasury although himself only a temporary civil servant aged thirty-six. But there were equally youthful members of the US delegation with whom he worked closely, initially in support of the position adopted by President Woodrow Wilson in seeking a negotiated peace with Germany. Hence Keynes’s close contact with both Norman Davis and also John Foster Dulles, then a young lawyer. Their task was to define the ‘reparations’ due from Germany under the Armistice agreement – often called the ‘Lansing Note’ after the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who was Dulles’s uncle.

The chapter deals with German politics in 1917 and the effects of the first Russian revolution in 1917, offering chances for peace in the east.

In this chapter, I consider the cognitive linguistic, relevance theoretic andgraded salience approaches to utterance interpretation. What they have incommon is that they view indirectness as a graded notion, not defined interms of a relationship between a sentence and a type of SA.

Greater inter-allied collaboration spurred by Caporetto did not iron out all the differences between the Allies. They re-emerged during the formulation and implementation of Allied grand strategy for 1918 and in the early peace-planning talks that occurred in parallel in Allied countries.

The Paris Peace Conference convened in January 1919 and did not officially close until one year later, after Germany formally ratified the Treaty of Versailles, but Wilson, Lloyd George, and the leading foreign dignitaries left for home in late June, as soon as the Germans signed their treaty. The Allies designated ambassadors or under-secretaries to represent them in the conclusion of the treaties for Austria (St. Germain), Bulgaria (Neuilly), Hungary (Trianon), and the Ottoman Empire (Sèvres), the latter two not signed until 1920. As the US secretary of state, Lansing, had feared, Wilson’s direct involvement at the conference reduced him to the level of just another negotiator and his Fourteen Points to mere bargaining chips, most of which were sacrificed in whole or in part to achieve the fourteenth: the creation of the League of Nations. While the provisions regarding Germany (reparations, war guilt, near-disarmament, and loss of territory and colonies) received the most attention, outcomes haunting the world into a second great war (and in some cases, beyond it) included the borders drawn in the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the decision of the conference to disregard the interests of Russia and, to a lesser extent, Italy.

The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 caused the United States to sever relations with Germany, though President Wilson held out hope for peace until learning that the German foreign secretary, Zimmermann, sought to turn Mexico against the US and use it as an intermediary to turn Japan against the Allies. Amid these tensions Nicholas II was overthrown and succeeded by a Provisional Government, ultimately led by Kerensky, which made the fateful decision to keep Russia in the war. In April 1917, days after the United States declared war, Germany gave Lenin transportation home from Switzerland, hoping he would foment a second revolution and knock Russia out of the war. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, Lenin indeed concluded an armistice with the Central Powers, but only after his appeal for a general peace “without annexations or indemnities” failed. The net result of the United States replacing tsarist Russia gave the Allies an ideological cohesion they had lacked previously. While Wilson characterized their war as a fight for universal rights and freedoms, the entry of the United States gave them millions of fresh troops to go with the capital, munitions, and supplies they were already receiving from American sources.

World War I’s legacy is most obvious in Europe, which it left with more small states dependent upon international organizations for their security. Wilson’s League of Nations – minus his own United States – failed to provide that security, leading many interwar Europeans to blame his compromised idealism for the rise of fascism and another world war. In the long run, however, Wilson’s ideals of self-determination, democracy, collective security, and an international rule of law were embodied in the European Union. Beyond Europe, the war transformed the Middle East by encouraging Zionism, Arab nationalism, and the Turkish model of secularism, along with the Islamist backlash against all three. Farther afield, it spawned communist movements that eventually took over in China and Vietnam, as well as the Indian and Pakistani nationalism that divided south Asia. For countries whose losses in World War II did not approach those of World War I – Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, along with France and Italy – the remembrance and commemoration of World War I remains a part of national life. For Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan, World War II became the more historically significant experience, for its role in making or breaking those countries as world powers.

In Chapter 3, we provide an overview of sensitive information in global governance and important historical context. The chapter first describes new data on the confidentiality features of a sample of 106 IOs. We review variation in the frequency and form of such protections and show that measures to protect various forms of sensitive information are surprisingly common and vary in interesting ways. The chapter then describes the rise of the norm of transparency in diplomacy and global governance after World War I, which then deepened with the end of the Cold War. This is juxtaposed with early examples of IOs experimenting with confidentiality and sensitive information. The chapter concludes by explaining how changes in technology and broader cooperative goals have generally led to efforts to integrate sensitive information into IOs, despite the resulting tension with transparency.

This chapter focuses on relevance theory. It first introduces its main tenets, before giving a detailed presentation of the cognitive and the communicative principles of relevance. With this framework in mind, the chapter goes on to illustrate how relevance theory deals with different cases involving pragmatic enrichment. It also introduces the notion of explicature, parallel to that of implicature that was introduced in relevance theory. Finally, the chapter illustrates how some pragmatic phenomena that were previously treated as cases of implicature have been reclassified as explicatures in relevance theory.

This chapter introduces the context in which Grice presented his theory of implicatures, with special reference to speech act theory. It goes on to present Grice’s main contribution to pragmatics, detailing his principle of cooperation and presenting an overview of the different types of implicatures that he defined. Finally, the chapter presents a number of criticisms that have been levelled at his theory.