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6 Rethinking the state Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell The United States spent more on its big bank bailout, which helped the banks to maintain their generous bonuses, than it spent to help those who were unemployed as a result of the recession that the big banks brought about. — Joseph Stiglitz1 The Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath alerted us once again to the dangers of an unfettered and unregulated market. The US, followed by the UK
M1634 - HAYWARD TEXT.qxp:ANDY Q7 27/1/09 13:23 Page 189 8 Governance, state and polity This chapter examines the conceptualisation of ‘governance’ in Irish official discourse in relation to both the Irish ‘state’ and the European ‘polity’. ‘State’ and ‘polity’ constitute the broad conceptual and institutional supporting frameworks for the meaning and significance of governance in nation-statehood and European Union respectively. The traditional narrative of the state is national self-determination, i.e. quest of the nation to decide and direct its own forms
In September 1922, after over two months of civil war, the deaths of Collins and Griffith, and the creation of a Free State army to suppress former colleagues, Richard Mulcahy rose in the Dáil to propose W.T. Cosgrave as the first president of the Executive Council, in effect the prime minister of the new Free State. Despite the obvious fracture in Sinn Féin over the
State of Play 5 There was a critic in The Daily Telegraph, James Walton, and the only reason I wrote State of Play was because he called me a warrior of white sliced bread, meaning I could only write working-class, and I was like ‘right, you fucker, I’m going to write something posh and you’ll have to retract that’. After the first episode he said that it was really good but that I’d got five hours left to fuck it up – basically that was his summary and I was like, ‘ha ha ha, I’m just going to wipe the floor with you now’. I wrote Shameless and State of Play in
In tragedies of state, national unity is sought yet never secured. The past is always present as a warning and a mirror of contemporary fears. These plays address political concerns from behind the shields of fictionality and geographical or historical distance, a strategy that was already familiar to political writers who often drew on the examples of republican and imperial Rome but which became increasingly urgent as England had to define itself in response to external and internal challenges. Though the locations of such plays might
Introduction This chapter is about national ties and how they are supposed to act as a glue that holds the state together in the eyes of its citizens. A nation-state, so the story goes, is one where all the people in the state are bound together by ties of national solidarity. The solidarity legitimates the state – it tells the citizens why they are members and why it is right for the state to exist
The image of Iran stretches back thousands of years to the time of Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire. The vast empire covered lands from Asia Minor to Europe and Egypt, and was the largest of its kind until the last emperor was overthrown by Alexander the Great. Thus, the components feeding into Iranian state identity have been continually negotiated and (re)constructed over time. Iranian state identity under the Pahlavi shahs, from 1925 until the overthrow of the last shah in 1979, is often understood as completely distinct from the post
Prior to the Civil Wars the secret intelligence activities of the English state had already begun to orientate themselves around the office of the secretary of state. In the English context at least, this office had emerged from a varied administrative background of royal courts and councils, closets and keepers of royal business secrets, becoming a secretary who, at first, mainly acted as the monarch’s own private servant. Throughout the seventeenth century this office was to retain some of these older
8 A permanently leaner state? The concluding chapter considers the durability of the processes of restructuring and the efforts to create a permanently leaner state that are now taking place, particularly in the UK. It argues that despite the radicalism of the changes being ushered in, they are nonetheless vulnerable to later roll-back In surveying the state and its institutional ‘stickiness’, Chapter 2 suggested that gradual change processes may have a rather more limited character than it sometimes appears. While the scholarly pendulum has now swung
response to its extensive exploitation of the oil and gas trade in the Middle East, and its dependence on the dominance of the US dollar, Nafeez Ahmed (2015) presciently described IS as the ‘cancer of modern capitalism’. Owing to its declaration of a Caliphate, paramilitary operations, and state-building practices, IS was until 2017 sometimes described as a quasi-nation state ( Cronin 2015 ), in contrast to the widely recognised networked and global geo-economic orientation of AQ. Building upon these existing explanations of neo-jihadism, in this chapter I illustrate