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against convict transportation. From 1844 onwards, growing numbers of colonists began to put pressure on London to abolish the convict system and to grant colonial self-government. Protest meetings were called, petitions were sent to London, and a string of letters purportedly detailing the state of the colony were published in The Times . Throughout this same period, a steady stream of influential
10 Big government and self-government, 1940–69 Because it has become a truism it is not necessarily untrue. The evacuation from May 1940 of much of the civilian population from Gibraltar, and especially some of their uncomfortable experiences in Britain and Northern Ireland, did embitter the exiles and those still resident in Gibraltar and did provoke demands for political change.1 The apparently tardy steps being taken by the British authorities to organise repatriation seemed to expose the limited political influence that Gibraltar civilians had over their own
How does the European Union affect devolution and nationalist conflict in member states? Does the EU reduce the scope of regional self-government or enhance it? Does it promote conflict or cooperation among territorial entities? These are pressing questions in Spanish politics, where devolution has been an important tool for managing nationalist disputes, and for the Basque Country, where protracted and sometimes violent nationalist conflicts persist. Addressing these issues, this book explores prospects for an autonomous Basque role in EU politics; institutional arrangements for autonomous community participation in EU decision making; Basque government alliances with other regions and the EU's supranational bodies; EU incentives for collaboration among Basque and central state authorities; the impact of EU decisions on politically sensitive Basque competencies; and the incidence of EU issues in nationalist disputes. It presents a theoretical framework for analysing the impact of the EU on regional power.
Across the continent of Africa, a web of laws silenced African speech. On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the end of British rule in Africa. Printing gave oppositions a voice, initially through broadsheets, tracts, pamphlets, later through books and articles. The group launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. They formed a part of International African Service Bureau (IASB), and the communists saw them as "generals without an army, they have no base and must depend on their pens". Padmore saw 'trusteeship' as a concept invoked as far back as the late nineteenth-century conferences that divided up Africa. Pan-Africa, a monthly periodical T. Ras Makonnen put out, reported that Richard Wright urged his listeners to form an international network of 'cultured progressives'. Labour-powered nationalism was to Padmore more than a drive for self-government. With the Gold Coast political ground so unsettled, neither Nkrumah nor the Convention People's Party (CPP) made Wright privy to their operations. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued A History of Pan-African Revolt , James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.
As seen in this first part of the book, the European dimension had a minimal impact on the politics of self-government in the 1970s. Most elite actors – notably those pro-devolution – saw few connections between the two issues and did not utilise the European dimension in their campaigns. By so doing they failed to allay fears among the mass public about the link between devolution and independence and the very negative view of the latter. The failure to Europeanise the politics of self-government meant that the latter remained a two
Despite significant change in the Scottish party system between the 1970s and the 1990s, in particular the accelerated decline of the Conservatives and the stabilisation at a fairly high level of the SNP, party positions on self-government remained remarkably stable. Labour championed devolution, the SNP pursued independence but supported devolution as second best and the Conservatives favoured the status quo, albeit this time also in principle as well as in practice. The strategic playing of the self-government game, on the other hand
European integration and devolution of power to the regional level are two of the most important phenomena which have affected the European states over the last thirty years. Their taking place more or less simultaneously has naturally raised the question of whether there is a causal connection between them, i.e. whether the process of supra-state integration generates or increases demands for regional self-government which lead to processes of regionalisation. The question has been present in the literature for
Interest groups were the other key elite actors who played a crucial role in the politics of self-government. Some of them had a historical presence within Scottish society and/or a large membership which lent them a degree of representativeness in ‘interpreting’ public opinion and in turn to shape it even superior to that of political parties. The key groups analysed here are the Church of Scotland, the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) and the business organisations. Following the pattern of chapter 2 , for each of these actors I
Political parties were the most important elite actors in the politics of Scottish self-government. Where parties stood on the spectrum of constitutional options, what perceptions they had of the European dimension and how they played their strategies are crucial factors in assessing their impact on the distribution of preferences at public opinion level. In this chapter I analyse such factors in relation to the Scottish National party (SNP), the Labour party and the Conservative party, the three main actors of the Scottish party system
(ACS) approach as broadly republican, concerned with individual and collective self-government by those who have a stake in the polity's future because of the circumstances of their lives. “Citizens are stakeholders in a democratic political community insofar as their autonomy and well-being depend not only on being recognized as a member in a particular polity, but also on that polity being governed democratically” (p. 41). Thus the essay