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There can be no doubt about the huge impact that Tony Blair had on the Labour Party. Labour has always been a party which embodied a high degree of internal pluralism, based on its internal factions and tendencies, its federal relations with affiliated organisations, its divided central authority, and its changing amalgam of leadership and democratic internal arrangements. Under Blair, however, there was a new centralising managerial impetus behind the search to make 'New Labour' a united and effective political force and in doing so to undermine other centres of internal power. It was generally expected, therefore, that in creating and reinforcing the leader's supremacy there would be a uniformity and homogeneity to managerial activities on his behalf. The General Election result of 2005 left Blair with a reduced majority still seeking to push through controversial legacy legislation which was to the right of the Labour Party mainstream, and still attempting also to change party and union representation. 'The Blair supremacy', such as it was, is presented as an important example of highly motivated and focused political skills but it is also evaluated as an education in broader and longer term collateral and consequential damage. The book ends with an epilogue where the party management of the new Leader, Brown is examined in the light of the inheritance from Blair, including the problems exacerbated before an election result that became recognised as 'the end of New Labour'.
It is seven decades since the start of the Spanish Civil War, and yet, as its repeated use as a signifier of idealism in fiction illustrates, impressions made during, or arising from, the conflict continue to resound. However, little regard has been given to the imagery and language employed by British commentators in their representations of events during the years of the Second Republic, although the value of such an approach has been demonstrated in an examination of contemporary British perceptions of Nazi Germany. It is the argument here that representations of Spain during the Second Republic and especially during the Civil War served in no small measure to ensure that in the public mind Spain did indeed remain 'a far away country', one whose war was of little concern to Britain. If pursuit of non-intervention was the contentious core of British responses to the war, a multiplicity of issues and interpretations acted throughout the conflict to shape and to moderate public and political reactions. While it can be argued that the efforts of both sets of supporters to ameliorate preconceived notions met with some success, clichéd impressions of the Spanish were so deeply entrenched in British culture that even recourse to refined stereotypes did little to convince the British public of a need to get involved in what remained an essentially alien and 'distant' war.
This book aspires to contribute to the literature on the theory and practice of European political integration by providing a systematic theorisation of Union citizenship and European migration policy, and a set of proposals for institutional reform. The subject matter of this study is a thorough examination of the process of community-building in the European Union, that is, the politics of 'belonging' and 'exclusion', as they find their juridico-political expression in citizenship laws and immigration policies, from the standpoint of normative political theory. This entails an inquiry into: (a) the question of socio-political membership in the emerging European polity and the issue of European identity, (b) the theory and politics of EU citizenship and (c) the issue of immigration. The lens of normative political theory will enable the critical examination of constitutive categories and conceptual frameworks by highlighting the historicity of their construction and possibilities for their reconceptualisation. It will also facilitate the analysis and critical evaluation of European institutions and discussion as to how these may be reformed. The book wishes to partake in the newly emergent but fast-growing search for a new explanatory framework in the Union. Intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism - the two paradigms which have dominated integration theory literature since the mid-1960s - have yielded important insights about the process of European integration, but have been unable to capture the complexity of the political evolution of European governance.
Film has been around now for over a hundred years, so it is surprising that the nature of its relationship to literature is still an open question. The transfer of an 'original' (literary) text from one context of production to an (audio-visual) other has begun to attract academic attention. The ideological investments at stake in this process reveal themselves in the central critical category of adaptation studies: the notion of 'fidelity', or 'faithfulness to the text'. This book takes the question of fidelity as their primary critical point of reference. As a critical term, fidelity behaves anomalously. Brian Mcfarlane has shown that there is no reliable equation between fidelity and critical approval, infidelity and disapproval. It is fascinating to see that Alison Platt and Ian MacKillop are interested in what it is about the experience of reading a classic novel that its adaptation restores to us. The book presents a group of essays loosely clustered around the English literary canon and ordered according to its chronology, not that of the films in question. The inference we might draw from the essays is not merely that 'English literature' remains a productive frame of reference for the study of film. It is also, perhaps, that the study of film might now derive more benefit from a treaty of union than a war of independence.
This is the first major exploration of how – and if – colonialism can be a useful concept in analysing Antarctica, and whether Antarctica can help reveal the analytical limits of colonialism as a concept. It is a contribution to the wider project of critical Antarctic studies, which challenges Antarctic exceptionalism and argues that Antarctica has always been integrated within global political and economic structures. In the introduction the editors lay out the justification for the book and the questions to be examined, followed by 12 substantive chapters. The first set of chapters focuses on case studies from Latin America, France, the USSR, eastern Europe and China, with analytical approaches from heritage studies, political philosophy, international relations and history. The second set takes up thematic questions related to animals and colonialism, bordering and frontiers, capitalism, field science practices and identities, religion, political domination, and knowledge practices. Finally, a postscript takes a more reflective approach to the relationship between colonialism and Antarctica and places it within the larger context of ongoing scholarly discussions. Overall the book provides an argument for the relevance of colonialism for thinking about Antarctica, and vice versa, and a set of perspectives on both the advantages and the potential limitations of such approaches.
Historical practice today is characterised by such growing diversity that there are now many ways of being a professional historian. This book focuses specifically on the rise of those who Carole Fink has recently referred to as the 'new historians', who choose to play the role of 'expert' in public debates about the past. Contemporary historians have been given the opportunity to climb down from the ivory tower and engage fully in public debate. It starts with two contributions exploring the general context of the changing role of the historian. Peter Mandler addresses the fundamental problem of the historian's professional, political and moral responsibilities. The book examines the contribution of historians to the process of coming to terms with a recent totalitarian, colonial or otherwise problematic past. It analyses the workings of bilateral historical commissions since the First World War, for example, those funded by UNESCO after 1945 to re-write history textbooks as part of the wider process of denazification. Many Communist countries also established bilateral commissions in an attempt to suppress long-term, 'pre-revolutionary' antagonism. The book discusses the problems encountered by the bilateral commission that investigated Italo-Slovene relations from the end of the nineteenth until well into the twentieth century, including the First and Second World Wars and their aftermath. The former imperial powers have been confronted in the past decade with uncomfortable questions resulting from the process of decolonisation after 1945. The book discusses the consequences of regime change on the way that the historical profession is organised and how historical inquiry is conducted. Historians in the East were profoundly affected by the 1989 Wende in Germany.
Cyprus is a conflict at the crossroads in more than one sense. It has been the site of one of the most long-standing and protracted conflicts in international politics, bedevilled by a complex interplay of actors and factors at the local, regional, European and international levels. Yet it finds itself at a particularly crucial moment in its historical evolution. This book is divided into four main parts. The first focuses on the internal actors and units of analysis within conflict contexts, and illustrates how and why delving into the dynamics within conflict parties can offer a richer and more comprehensive understanding of the existence, persistence and evolution of conflict. The second book turns to external actors and factors in conflict, and assess how the regional, European and wider international dimensions of the Cyprus conflict have influenced conflict dynamics, in interaction with its internal determinants. The third part broadens this set of approaches by involving the case of Cyprus in comparative analysis, be this on the constitutional features of future solutions, on the role of one internal actor in conflict within European Union, such as the refugees, or on the role of an external actor involved in conflict resolution. The last part of the book broadens out beyond conflict studies strictly defined.
This book is concerned with the nature of contemporary Latin American political culture. In this it adheres to the tradition of the Western liberal democratic paradigm, which considers politics to be a compromise and repudiates ideological, holistic world-views. Thus, in discussing countries which have experienced transitions to constitutional government following periods of military rule, Lawrence Whitehead describes the emergence of 'stalemate' politics: 'reformist, populist or socialist projects had been attempted and had failed; reactionary authoritarian projects had also been attempted and had also failed'. The other perspective is based upon a radical democratic model which is critical of the first approach and advocates popular empowerment. It projects the need for structural transformations of Latin American societies and economies (to avoid needless repetition, this umbrella term is to be understood as including Central America unless otherwise stated), the opening up of political systems and the end of mass marginalization. It thus continues in the Marxist and socialist tradition but searches for new methods and strategies, given the bankruptcy of earlier radical projects. The first model is posited upon a non-participatory view of democracy, with politics being regarded as an elite occupation. A case in point is that of debt and the socio-economic and political implications it has had for Latin America. The major consequence has been the virtually universal application of neo-liberal economic restructuring programmes.
This book addresses the question of how identity is formed as a result of corporeal and cultural positioning, by mapping Dorothy Richardson's early modernist text, Pilgrimage, against our postmodern interest in real and imagined geographies. It seeks to explore the issue of liminality and simultaneity in Pilgrimage by examining Richardson's textual enspacements, whereby, as Max Bense suggests, space should be conceived as the nodal point knotting together a variety of instances. The book explores textual renditions of actual material places in Pilgrimage which implicitly refer to a reality outside the text and, at the same time, the use of spatial metaphors which are not related to any actual locations, but rather serve to encode abstract concepts like belongingness, communication or writing within spatial terms. It examines the diverse ways in which language not only renders tangible concrete places and metaphorical spaces but also itself spaces these representations. The book focuses on the localities inhabited by the protagonist Miriam, especially the correlation between location and human existence and examines the tectonic principle underlying epistemology and cognition. It addresses the analogy between space and text and discusses the work of Genette, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, all of whom offer a structuralist analysis of enspacement in narrative representation.
On its publication, Burke's Reflections entered a highly charged political context. Relatively few positive public responses are documented, partly because, even before one considers the nature of the text, its author was already public property and immersed in a complex set of partisan, and sometimes simply prejudiced, relationships with people in power and with the print culture which surrounded him. Burke's Reflections provides the metaphysical dressing to many brands of conservative and liberal democratic thought. The essays in the book reflect and extend recent trends in critical and historiographical work on the Reflections which have included a desire to return Burke to his original historical context and to see him as a pragmatist whose writing is strategic and provisional rather than theoretical and systematic. Each of the contributors here is engaged in negotiating and traversing the interdisciplinary boundaries between history, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. They engage in the various kinds of interpretive strategies that are most commonly associated with English studies and cultural studies; and they are all also interested in having to move between the different contexts in which both Burke's text and they themselves are situated. In their different ways, they acknowledge that reading the Reflections is no easy business; any reading of this text has to be argued for and struggled over, and the outcome will be understood against the history of previous readings.