In this project, I investigate the emergence, projection, and contestation of what I call the 'strategic narrative' of nuclear order in Europe. This narrative emerged in the 1960s as the ideological foundation of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, displacing alternative visions of nuclear politics such as comprehensive disarmament and a supranational European nuclear community. Navigating between the alleged extremes of immediate abolition and unrestrained proliferation, policy elites in Europe and North America converged on the goal of freezing nuclear politics in its current form. For the narrators of nuclear order – influential policymakers and defence intellectuals – the primary task of any diplomatic process should be to avert disruptive changes and secure stability through managerial control. To that end, the narrators of nuclear order promoted the ideas that nuclear weapons are indispensable for the maintenance of peace, that extended nuclear deterrence provides a bulwark against proliferation, and that nuclear risks are controllable. This narrative has since been solidified through official government communication and incorporation into high-school textbooks, policy discourse, print and broadcast media, and other cultural products. The strategic narrative of nuclear order has been most powerfully projected by members and supporters of NATO. The continuation of the policies of extended nuclear deterrence, ‘nuclear sharing’, and step-by-step arms control has come to be defined as irreplaceable elements of the alliance’s material and ontological security. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the narrative of nuclear order has collided with attempts at developing an image of Europe as a human-security oriented normative power. Moreover, the prevailing narrative is currently under pressure both by norm entrepreneurs and technological developments that challenge the sustainability of deterrence.

John Hume and the Creation of the European Dimension in Ireland will investigate how John Hume helped to create the conditions for a diverse constituency in Northern Ireland to reimagine its political and cultural identity in Europe. The kernel of JHCEDI is a research question that has not been adequately addressed in the literature on Hume, or on Ireland in Europe: How did Hume’s reconceptualisation of Ireland in Europe facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland? This project could hardly be more timely: a thorough public awareness of the history of Northern Ireland in Europe through the lens of its key political actor, Hume, over the past half-century could provide a vital contribution to public discourse and attitudes towards the future. Today three pillars of considerable geopolitical significance – the threat to the Good Friday Agreement, the disruptions of Brexit, and the ongoing controversies that surround the Northern Ireland Protocol – give urgency to JHCEDI. No work yet exists that fully transcends the paradigms in which Hume has been framed by situating Hume’s project in the paradigm of nation formation in a European tradition as well as in ethnic studies. This is the gap in the literature that JHCEDI will address. The vision he shared with t of a Europe of regions and of shared sovereignty was at once a transnational priority for Hume and a strategy to resolve Ireland’s internal dilemmas. The objective of JHCEDI is to investigate how Hume helped to create the conditions for a diverse constituency in Northern Ireland to reimagine their political inheritance. The outputs of JHCEDI will be the articles and the public dissemination of my findings, being essential actions to lay the groundwork for my monograph in this subject.

In the Second World War, the Allies waged war on a truly global scale for the first and, one hopes, last time in history. Victory required the mobilisation and transportation of wo/men and materiel on all continents and across four out of the Earth’s five oceans. Success would have been impossible without extensive inter-Allied coordination, organisation and planning. Starting in 1939, a system of inter-Allied organs was set up by Britain and France, whose mission it was to coordinate the supply of the Allied war effort from a common pool. It survived France’s fall in 1940 and, upon US entry in 1941, was revived. By 1942, it had evolved into a global network of military, production and logistics experts from India to Canada and South Africa to Norway, organised into a series of so-called Combined Boards and dedicated to the nuts and bolts of worldwide coalition warfare. Yet we lack a history of this extraordinary organisation. Despite the Second World War’s self-evidently global nature, the tendency to frame it in national, comparative and Eurocentric terms is very deeply entrenched. INTERALLIED, by contrast, seeks to highlight the global, transnational and interdependent character of the Allied war effort. The project asks: how did the Allies seek to couple, then uncouple their war economies, and mobilise (then demobilise) global markets for war, between 1939 and 1945? It seeks (1) to provide an account of the political economy of global Allied warfare, and thus to reach for a history of the global economy at war, which has yet to be written; (2) to advance a recent 'global turn' in Second World War studies, and thus to resist nationalistic and Eurocentric readings of the conflict, frequently deployed politically today; and (3) to produce new, practical knowledge about how societies can cope with massive shocks to their systems of supply, production and trade, and prevent damaging and wasteful competition for scarce resources.