Browsing by Author "Kearney, Arran"

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    Contra Mundum: The European Union must seek a Rapprochement with Poland
    (2023-12-09) Kearney, Arran; Hoover, Heather
    Relations between the European Union and the Third Polish Republic have grown steadily worse over recent years - to the point where some political commentators have begun to speculate on the future of Poland’s membership. The key issues at hand are those of Judicial Reform, the European Migration crisis and responsibility for the refugees crossing the Polish border from the embattled Ukraine. Polish politicians have argued that the European Union is doing both too much and too little - involving themselves too heavily in the internal politics of the Polish state whilst also stymying aid when Poland needs it most. All of these issues play into broader underlying ideological differences between the European Union and Poland, defined by history, shifts in the priorities of the bloc and the modern Polish conception of its own sovereign independence. Given the historic and contemporary dynamics of Poland’s relationship with the western states, particularly with Germany, both the power and the will for reconciliation rests with the European Union - it must take the impetus in this reconciliation process to prevent any further Polish retreat into isolation within the Visegrad Group.
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    Reconciling Hitlerian Aggression to Taylorian Diplomatic Narrative
    (2024-04-18) Kearney, Arran; Dillon, Tim
    In seeking to morally defend the work of AJP Taylor one must demonstrate that properly assessing the diplomatic weight of Allied blunders, and the extent to which they helped bring about the Second World War, does not in turn inevitably lead a historian to forget or diminish Herr Hitler’s role in instigating the conflict. Instead it might enable a historian to better understand how both the Allies and Axis powers came to a place in September 1939 where they committed to a war over Poland that neither side seemed to anticipate or desire at that given moment. Using the the Munich Pact, the zenith of Allied appeasement, as a locus point, this paper will argue that (following that moment) Allied blunders and Hitlerian opportunism were made indistinguishable within the formation of a single diplomatic system. Examining this and the events that ensued shows Taylor’s judgements on Allied policy to hold a great deal of water, so long as they are modified to contain the fixed historic principle of Hitlerian Aggression. In studying the erroneous precedents Great Britain established under the Munich Agreement, together with the further blunders she committed from that point and the German invasion of Poland, she might be said to have, in a diplomatic sense, contributed at least as much as Hitler’s own aggression towards the joining of general war in Europe as it happened at that specific place and specific time.