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This book analyses the contemporary politics of the nation states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and the Home Rule territories of Greenland, Faeroes and Åland that together make up the Nordic region. It covers Scandinavia past and present, parties in developmental perspective, the Scandinavian party system model, the Nordic model of government, the Nordic welfare model, legislative-executive relations in the region, and the changing security environment. The Nordic states have a shared history, common linguistic bonds and a common state Lutheran religion. Of the six Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, whilst Swedish is an official national language in Finland. Turning to a brief overview of nation-building and state-building in the Nordic region, an obvious distinction can be drawn between those 'stateless nations' which went on to achieve statehood and the territories that have not achieved independence. The book presents a brief chronology of events in Norden up to 1922, when Åland achieved autonomy. In Sweden the historic phase of party-building produced a basic two-plus-three configuration and a party system based on five 'isms': communism, social democracy, agrarianism, liberalism and conservatism. By 1930 there was a bifurcated parliamentary left and a fragmented nonsocialist bloc consisting of essentially town-based Liberal and Conservative parties and a farmer-based Agrarian Party. Whilst acknowledging the limitations inherent in the periodisation of party system change, the book focuses on the extent of party system change since the 'earthquake elections' of 1970-73.
civil servants in Helsinki were Swedish- not Finnish-speaking and worked for the Russian czar. Turning to a brief overview of nation-building and state-building in the Nordic region, an obvious distinction can be drawn between those ‘stateless nations’ which went on to achieve statehood (Finland, Norway and Iceland) and the territories that have not achieved independence (the Faeroes, Green land and Åland). Table 2.1 presents a brief chronology of events in Norden up to 1922, when Åland achieved autonomy. Finland: nationalism under czarism The basic structures of the
the humorous side of things! This chapter, however, is not about eagles, still less hens; rather, it focuses on a particular swan – the eight-quilled swan of Nordic co-operation depicted in the logo of the Nordic Council and representing the five nation states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and the three Home Rule territories of the Faeroes, Greenland and Åland. It offers a broad introduction to the (changing) geo-politics of the Nordic region and views co-operation and, more frequently in an historical light, conflict between the member states in
As a historian of late imperial Russia McKean thus defies easy classification. He is both variously optimist and pessimist, at each instance aware of the complexities and contingencies of history. The imperial regime was willing to concede only the façade of a parliament, as an analysis of the Duma between 1905 and 1917 makes clear. Two examinations of late imperial intellectuals perceive some rays of hope for the late imperial regime. Murray Frame puts forward an alternative reading of late imperial civil society. According to Vincent Barnett, one leading student of the late imperial economy thought that it was undergoing an impressive expansion under tsarism. Although it was events in the capital that secured Nicholas II's downfall, the fate of the late imperial regime was perhaps more affected by its relations with the peasantry: the vast majority of the country's population. It is to McKean's credit, however, that he was able to introduce genuine doubt into a scholarly community all too keen to write off Nicholas II, largely accepting Haimson's thesis that there was a crisis of revolutionary proportions affecting late imperial Russia pre-1914. It is a pity that Haimson has not openly responded to McKean's challenging and more nuanced interpretation of late imperial Russia. Further research, particularly into civil society in the provinces, may well yet alter further our perceptions of late imperial Russia's problems and prospects.
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly argued polemic or through imaginative storytelling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grassroots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal–human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal–human history.
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance about the pastoral exploits of the princes Musidorus and Pyrocles (aka Zelmane the amazon) remains one of the defining works of English fiction. The New Arcadia – the revised, unfinished version first published in print in 1590 – differs from its more widely known cousin the Old Arcadia, which circulated in manuscript during Sidney’s lifetime, in two major points. The first of these is its ambitious, non-chronological approach to the narrative, resulting in crucial plot details (and even the true identities of the main protagonists) being initially withheld from the reader. The second difference is in the New Arcadia’s rhetorically elaborate style, which consolidated Sidney’s reputation most skilled prose stylists of the English Renaissance. This edition of the New Arcadia is the first in 37 years and combines the text of Victor Skretkowicz’s seminal 1987 edition with a substantially expanded commentary and additional long notes on the book’s history in print and Sidney’s use of rhetorical devices.
, above all, more than anything else, hating myself for not being able to open my bloody mouth and sing … 5 And yet the worst example of racism I ever suffered did not happen in Gibraltar or even in mainland Britain, but about 4,000 kilometres away from the Rock, on the Baltic island of Åland. I had gone there to take part in the 1991 Island Games, a sort of mini-Olympics for islands and small territories. I was twenty-two years old, a quiet, dreamy, wavy-haired youth who had abandoned a History degree course at the University of Manchester a year earlier due to
Joenniemi, ‘Prologue: towards post-modern arms control?’, in Pertti Joenniemi (ed.), Confidence-Building and Arms Control: Challenges around the Baltic Rim (Aland: The Aland Islands Peace Institute, 1999), pp. 127–46. 23 ‘Security-related export controls’, http://ue.eu.int/cms3_fo
,000 people – 45 per cent of the Sfp’s vote in 1907 – were party members (Sundberg 1985: 46). During the first years of national independence, the Sfp was suspected of harbouring separatist elements (i.e. of having ‘Åland’s disease’), or at least of containing persons who favoured the establishment of self-governing Swedish regions. It was faced with aggressive threats from the so-called ‘real Finns’ (aitosuomalaisuusliike) to Fennocise such Swedish-speaking fortresses as Helsinki University, the country’s only state university. The aim of the ‘real Finns’ was to abandon
seats to their Home Rule territories. In the Folketing both Greenland and the Faeroes are represented by two MPs. In the Eduskunta, the Åland islands elect a single member and, throughout, he or she – for the first time in 2007 a woman was elected for Åland – has joined the Swedish People’s Party’s PPG. The Norwegian Storting had 155 members from the time of the Eidsvoll constitution in 1814 to 1985, when the number was increased by two, and it rose again, to 165, in 1989. The Storting currently comprises 169 members. In both Norway and Sweden there is an