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Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
Newspapers, magazines and pamphlets have always been central, almost sacred, forms of communication within Irish republican political culture. While social media is becoming the primary ideological battleground in many democracies, Irish republicanism steadfastly expresses itself in the traditional forms of activist journalism.
Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters is a long-term analysis of the development of Irish republican activist media since 1998 and the tumultuous years following the end of the Troubles. It is the first in-depth analysis of the newspapers, magazines and online spaces in which the differing strands of Irish republicanism developed and were articulated during a period where schism and dissent defined a return to violence.
Based on an analysis of Irish republican media outlets as well as interviews with the key activists that produced them, this book provides a compelling long-term snapshot of a political ideology in transition. It reveals how Irish Republicanism was moulded by the twin forces of the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the violent internal ideological schism that threatened a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the Troubles.
This book is vital for those studying Irish politics and those interestedin activism as it provides new insights into the role that modern activist media forms have played in the ideological development of a 200-year-old political tradition.
Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.
‘Borghesia: “Budite samo svoji, ne kopirajte, ne imitirajte uzore!” ’, http://balkanrock. com/borghesiabudite-samo-svoji-ne-kopirajte-ne-imitirajte-uzore/ (last accessed 28 February 2014). 4 Ljubica Spaskovska, ‘The “children of crisis”: Making sense of (post) socialism and the end of Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Societies (forthcoming).
functions; their careers and pan-European political, socio-economic and cultural networks tell us much about their place in the host societies.3 After all, the Irish Jacobite military formed only one part of a multi-faceted expatriate population that organised itself in host kingdoms, empires and nations. Irish banking, clerical, maritime, mercantile, political and professional communities also serviced the Irish military, looking after their educational, familial, financial and spiritual welfare and facilitating crucial links with their compatriots at home. 58 british
leaders, until the banking crisis knocked the wind out of their sails. Paradoxically, coping with the unpredictability and risks of major social changes always invites a kind of ‘noble lie’. We claim to be more in command of our situation than we are, as a strategy for gaining what command we can over events. The story of the HBOS merger and its eventual crisis illustrates this at one scale, and the recent referendums on constitutional matters illustrate it at another. The fate of the European political economy (let alone the global political economy), and how best to
organizaciones del descontento?: los retos de las estrategias de renovación sindical en España’, Arxius de sociologia, 18, 119–33. Role of the state in Spanish labour and employment relations 307 Martínez Lucio, M. and Blyton, P. (1995), ‘Constructing the post‐Fordist state? The politics of labour market flexibility in Spain’, West European Politics, 18:2, 340–60. Martínez Lucio, M. and Connolly, H. (2012), ‘Transformation and continuities in urbanstruggles: urban politics, trade unions and migration in Spain’, Urban Studies, 49:3, 669–84. Meardi. G., Donaghey, J. and
sector caused the economy to free-fall and threatened the stability of the common currency of Europe. Political apathy was replaced by activism and politicians competed to be more outraged by corporate wrongdoing. Politicians stated that bankers were guilty of economic treason, did more damage to the State than the IRA, and should be treated like terrorists. Corporate and white-collar crimes became politicised and the State demonstrated a tendency to ‘govern through crime’ (Simon, 2007). Developments which had previously been introduced under the blanket of
into common EU borders, secured and sealed by common EU political and policing measures. Despite the gradual inclusion of many Eastern European countries to the EU, the zones of the inexpensive sex or gambling industries along the old East–West European borders are an explicit example of the fact that the whole process is indeed ongoing. The initial example we used, the Otranto tragedy, demonstrates how the Eastern Europeans were the first to suffer from the “Fortress Europe” politics. Nevertheless, currently we are witnessing the turn of Eastern Europe to claim its