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This book broadly looks at what has been commonly identified as the liberalisation process across the one-party regimes of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during the period 1987-89. The focus of the book is on one particular joint initiative, which the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, strongly encouraged his fraternal counterparts to embrace. It examines how these leaderships sought to work together, with varying degrees of success, to overcome problems which were clearly systemic and common to all these regimes at the time. The underlying rationale which underpinned this initiative was the preservation of the socialist fraternity as a group; this was perceived as a duty to which all these regimes were bound by the Warsaw Pact and the Socialist International. Across the fraternity a movement was initiated by Gorbachev with the purpose of maintaining the one-party regime, much along the same trajectory which the Communist Party of China had begun in 1985. The book explores the phenomenon of the conferences in CEE, and interprets conference outcomes as indicative of the lengths to which these parties, or at least the General/First Secretary and his supporters, were willing to go in changing their regimes to make them viable. At each conference, those with a voice at the meeting made it clear that the introduction of a multiparty system was unthinkable. The book concentrates on fraternal parties that used their respective conferences to align their parties with Gorbachevian perestroika.
The spatial element in post-communist Russian politics is now a political fact, but the scope and nature of regional autonomy and initiative is far less clear. In the 1990s the old hyper-centralised Soviet state gave way to the fragmentation of political authority and contesting definitions of sovereignty. Under President Boris Yeltsin a complex and unstable balance was drawn between the claimed prerogatives of the centre and the normative and de facto powers of the regions. This book argues convincingly that Russia will never be able to create a viable democracy as long as authoritarian regimes are able to flourish in the regions. The main themes covered are democratisation at the regional level, and the problems faced by the federal states in forging viable democratic institutions in what is now a highly assymetrical Federation. The book presents a combination of thematic chapters with case studies of particular regions and republics. It takes into account the literature available on the 'new institutionalism' and outlines the importance of institutions in developing and maintaining democracy. The book discusses the importance of sovereignty, federalism and democratic order, and considers the distinct problems of party-building in Russia's regions. It considers electoral politics and the whole issue of regional politics and democratisation in five particular areas of Russia - Novgorod, the Komi Republic, Russia's Far East, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.
In the context of French history, matters began to change when - for reasons that cannot be reviewed here - the 'social interpretation' collapsed in the 1970s and the Revolution was re-interpreted as a broad-based struggle against royal 'despotism' rather than as a bourgeois attack upon 'feudal' aristocracy. Far more sympathetic to the Revolution and far more sensitive to context than Furet, Lynn Hunt also made conspiracy a key element in her pioneering analysis of the Revolution's political culture. In this work, she demonstrated how fears of conspiracy, real and imagined, led revolutionaries into an endless search for 'transparency,' that is, the elimination of all guises that counterrevolutionary conspirators might use to undermine the Revolution. The fear of conspiracy underlay the call for persistent demonstrations of patriotic virtue under the Terror, which were intended to allay suspicion of covert dealing with the dark forces of the counter-Revolution. But because patriotism itself had become a conspiratorial mask, professions of civisme carried increasingly less weight, and in the end everyone remained a potential conspirator. Many indeed were the seductions of power, ambition, wealth, and distinction allegedly proffered by Pitt and the Austrian princes, who appeared to have endless resources at their disposal. Their point of leverage was clearly the corruptibility of the human soul, a vulnerability that had been repeatedly underlined in republican polemics and Christian discourse, especially of the Jansenist variety, and had long been associated with the royal court, a public space allegedly devoid of virtue and patriotism.
Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.
This book is a collection of diplomatic and military documents which illuminate the origins of the First World War. They provide an international account of the diplomatic developments of the pre-war years and the final weeks of peace, and were chosen with a focus on understanding the many remaining controversies surrounding the war's origins. Selected from a broad range of sources and countries, many of the documents are newly discovered and previously unpublished archival sources, and others have been cited in monographs but are not necessarily widely known. Some are 'standard' documents that warrant inclusion due to their significance. Others have been translated into English specifically for this volume, or where translations already exist many have been updated and improved. Imanuel Geiss's path-breaking document collection Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch exceeded a thousand pages in two volumes. It only included documents that were available in the early 1960s, and it focused entirely on July 1914. Taken together, they highlight the events of the years 1911-1914 in broad brushstrokes, and they illuminate in more detail the diplomatic interactions of the July Crisis when the decisions which led to the outbreak of war were taken. The book offers a wealth of primary sources, and its purpose is to enable its readers to draw their own conclusions, based on evidence, as to why war broke out in August 1914.
This book begins from the assumption that race and empire have been central to early modern and modern British history. It addresses the question of how histories written in the past, in different political times, dealt with, considered, or avoided and disavowed Britain's imperial role and issues of difference. The book considers how we might re-think British history in the light of transnational, trans-imperial and cross-cultural analysis, for British history may come to look very different once it is decentered from the national and placed within an imperial and global framework. It, in the contrary, starts from the premise that the denial of racial and ethnic conflicts inside the United Kingdom together with the absence of race as a central category of analysis in historical writing has significantly limited our understanding of British history. In the final part of the book Kathleen Wilson, Antoinette Burton and Geoff Eley all pose fundamental issues about the terrains of contemporary imperial and domestic history writing and the challenges of transnational and trans-imperial work. Wilson uses her eighteenth-century case studies to think about the ways in which mobility across space and time unsettle the idea of the nation as a collective experience. She asks how the English and British overseas contributed to notions of nationality, moving away from the writings of those who thought of themselves as historians to the writings of those who were crafting new notions of national history and identity in their reports and letters from liminal sites of empire.
In this broad sweep, Mayo explores dominant European discourses of higher education, in the contexts of different globalisations and neoliberalism, and examines its extension to a specific region. It explores alternatives in thinking and practice including those at the grassroots, also providing a situationally grounded project of university–community engagement. Signposts for further directions for higher education lifelong learning, with a social justice purpose, are provided.
Few works of economic and political analysis have exerted a more profound influence on European, American and latterly world economic and social policy than Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The version of Adam Smith's economic and social philosophy which has been invoked by proponents such as those in the Adam Smith Institute has often not been the product of a reading of the whole of the Wealth of Nations, but has rested instead on acceptance of the selective reading of parts of the book developed by nineteenth-century market liberals. In the nineteenth century, critiques of the effects of the division of labour were developed outside political economy by a sequence of British cultural critics from Hazlitt and Coleridge to Carlyle and Arnold, who deployed them in their attacks on contemporary industrial capitalism and the 'dismal science' of economics which they saw as providing its intellectual rationalisation; more radically, they formed an important element in the critique of political economy developed by Engels and Marx. Reaffirming the importance of the cultural analysis in the Wealth of Nations as a whole has been an important element in re-examining the historical particularity of Smith's work. Bearing in mind the strength of the cultural critique developed in the later books of the Wealth of Nations, a textually aware reading of the whole work suggests the extent to which its earlier and most famous arguments rest on what might be called strategic imprecisions.
This book examines a range of concepts in the light of feminist critiques, and considers whether they may need to be reconstituted in the light of these critiques. It assesses the impact of feminist debates on mainstream thought. The book provides a balance between 'classic' political concepts and those that are being currently developed by feminist theorists, and to reflect the interconnections between the various sub-fields of Politics as a discipline. Many chapters engage with the concept of politics itself and with the public/private dichotomy. Some chapters discuss issues around the state, power, care, difference and equality and the ways in which different aspects of inequality intersect. Others attempt to contextualise gender in relation to other structural inequalities such as class and 'race'. All the chapters engage in some way with feminist critiques of the dualistic thinking that underpins conventional and narrow understandings of the political, particularly in liberal thought. The book demonstrates that if feminist analysis is taken seriously, conventional patterns of thought and practice are significantly disrupted. It plays a role in encouraging all political theory students and academics to see that good, effective theory requires serious engagement with feminist ideas. As such, these ideas help lay the foundations for more genuinely inclusive political thought.
This book opens with a review of some of the significant themes concerning women's citizenship from the perspective of politics. It considers the environment in which women live and the identities they possess and how these characteristics contribute to the nature of their citizenship. The book analyses how its commitment to gender mainstreaming has affected the United Nations' activities, particularly with respect to environmental law. It addresses the nature of women's access to citizenship in the West through considering both women's unfair exposure to environmental problems (in that it is disproportionately negative compared to men's) and the strategies they adopt to redress this. The book considers active citizenship in the urban landscape. It examines women's citizenship in post-communist Russia, focusing on the Soldiers' Mothers' committee. Their existence constitutes an active part of Russia's nascent civil society. The collapse of soviet socialism has had some highly negative consequences for women, including under-representation in political institutions and growing unemployment. Since his election as president in 2000, Putin has sought to create a 'managed democracy' with the aim of co-opting or coercing civil society organisations. Despite this, and the fact that feminist and human rights discourses are quite weak in Russia today, the Soldiers' Mothers' committees continue to grow and have won respect and support.