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Parties of the extreme Right have experienced a dramatic rise in electoral support in many countries in Western Europe over the last two and a half decades. This phenomenon has been far from uniform, however, and the considerable attention that the more successful right-wing extremist parties have received has sometimes obscured the fact that these parties have not recorded high electoral results in all West European democracies. Furthermore, their electoral scores have also varied over time, with the same party recording low electoral scores in one election but securing high electoral scores in another. This book examines the reasons behind the variation in the electoral fortunes of the West European parties of the extreme right in the period since the late 1970s. It proposes a number of different explanations as to why certain parties of the extreme right have performed better than others at the polls and it investigates each of these different explanations systematically and in depth.
One of the key aims of this book is to offer a synthesis of the main findings of current research on age. It is intended as an outline survey and consequently the scope of the book is deliberately broad: it covers two centuries, considers the large land mass of Western Europe with its diverse languages, customs and cultures, and ranges across the social spectrum. The book focuses solely on the Christian West, including consideration on the extent to which social rank influenced life expectancy, the methods and goals of upbringing, marriage patterns and funerary memorialisation. The book also demonstrates how extensive that range can be. Examples are drawn from manorial accounts, tax assessments, spiritual writings, didactic literature, romances, elegies, art and architecture. The main thrust is that age formed an essential part of a person's identity in late medieval Europe. During adolescence, men and women progressively took on their adult roles. Three chapters are devoted to educating girls. The book discusses young people's period of transition between childhood and adulthood. It draws attention to pious young women who fought against marriage and wanted a chaste life. Divergences between northern and southern Europe in terms of marriage patterns, family formation, opportunities for women and attitudes towards death and its rituals are discussed. The book shows that attitudes towards the undeveloped young meant that children had few legal responsibilities. Another aim of the book is to consider the changing opportunities and possibilities for people as they progressed through life.
A ROUND the year 1000, the Latin Church in many ways defined western Europe. Through a string of chapels, churches, monasteries and clergy extending from Ireland into eastern Europe and beyond the Elbe and Saale Rivers, from the Scandinavian countries to the northern Iberian peninsula, and especially in the European heartlands of Italy, France and the German Empire, the Latin Church was beginning physically to dominate the landscape of western Europe. It also began the immense task of trying to reshape the thought patterns of its many peoples. Led by the
2 Constructing the threat of terrorism in Western Europe and the European Union: a genealogy Introduction There can be little doubt that EU politicians and policy-makers view terrorism as one of the most pervasive threats to the security of the EU, its member states and its citizens. Speaking in 2008, the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator (EU CTC) Gilles de Kerchove made this case by arguing that ‘terrorism remains the most significant actual threat facing democratic societies’.1 Drawing upon a ‘biological life’ metaphor, de Kerchove went on to state that the
As the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s recedes from popular memory,
researchers are once again beginning to engage with the subject from historical
perspectives. This collection brings together some of the exciting new work
emerging from this resurgence, addressing essential but much less well-known
histories of HIV/AIDS.
Focusing on regions of Western Europe, Histories of
HIV/AIDS introduces aspects of the epidemic from places including Scotland,
Wales, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Switzerland, and draws
attention to the experiences and activities of often-overlooked people: sex
workers, drug users, mothers, nurses, social workers, and those living and
working in prisons. It also examines the challenges, opportunities, and risks at
the heart of how we archive and remember this epidemic. Highlighting the
importance of understanding local and national contexts, transnational
interactions, and heterogeneous forms of policy, activism, and expertise, it
encourages attention to the complexity of these histories and their ongoing
importance today.
Of particular interest to historians of modern Europe and
health, area studies specialists, and those working with archives and museums,
this book is an essential addition to HIV/AIDS studies and histories.
, radicalising groups move away from moderation in discourse and practice. In this regard, it is more helpful to introduce differentiations according to the scope of the political project and the relationship towards violence. Islamist actors in Western Europe display in this regard great diversity. Islamist activism in Western Europe: conceptual and phenomenological distinctions Islamist activism in a Western European context refers both to a wide range of social phenomena and contested political and scholarly
As European politics, society, economy and religion underwent epoch-making changes between 1400 and 1600, the treatment of Europe's Jews by the non-Jewish majority was, then as in later periods, a symptom of social problems and tensions in the Continent as a whole. Through a broad-ranging collection of original documents, the book sets out to present a vivid picture of the Jewish presence in European life during this vital and turbulent period. This book discusses the history and background of the Jewish presence in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. As far as the late medieval Church was concerned, the basis for the treatment of Jews, by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, was to be found in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of the Roman Church, which were issued in 1215. The book is concerned with Jewish economic activities for their own sake, and Jews' financial relations with Christian rulers. It then concentrates on other aspects of the dealings which went on between European Jews and their Christian neighbours. The book includes the Jews' own economic presence and culture, social relations between Jews and Christians, the policies and actions of Christian authorities in Church and State. It draws upon original source material to convey ordinary people's prejudices about Jews, including myths about Jewish 'devilishness', money-grabbing, and 'ritual murder' of Christian children. Finally, the book demonstrates from the outset that much of the treatment of European Jews, in the period up to the Reformation and thereafter, was to be a practical result of the controversies within 'Christendom' on the subject of authority, whether ecclesiastical or secular.
In the last three decades the anthropology of Western Europe has become almost exclusively an anthropology of urban life. The anthropology of rural life in Western Europe has been progressively neglected. Yet, just because cities concentrate people who continue to produce new and unexpected forms of social organization does not mean rurality becomes the emptying home of a tired traditionalism. Far from it. Since the city is only defined by opposition to the countryside, and since rural movements have urban effects, we cannot ignore the changes taking place in hamlets, villages, and rural towns throughout Western Europe. They are a integral part and parcel of life in Europe today. The key aim of this book is to redress this academic imbalance, by examining some of the central changes in the rural zones of contemporary Western Europe. In particular, most contributors look at the newcomers to these areas and the rainbow variety of effects they are having. The ‘alternative’ in our title is to be understood broadly. The contributors are not just looking at the self-proclaimed alternatives (hippies, New Agers, back-to-nature types, etc.) but at labour migrants from outside Western Europe and affluent resettlers as well. Members of all these groups are, in their own way, contributing towards the construction of a non-traditional countryside. All of them help to maintain life in rural areas which would otherwise be emptying of residents.
This is an exploration of social cohesion in rural settlements in western Europe in the period 700–1050 CE, and of the extent to which settlements, or districts, constituted units of social organisation. It focuses on the interactions, interconnections and networks of people who lived side by side – neighbours. Drawing evidence from most of the current western European countries, the book plots and interrogates the very different practices of this wide range of regions in a systematically comparative framework, offering a new approach to well-known problems of the early Middle Ages by bringing together expertise from different national traditions. It examines how people in the localities of the early medieval West worked together in pursuit of shared goals beyond the level of the household, and how (and whether) they formed their own groups through that collective action. It considers the variety of local responses to the supra-local agents of landlords and rulers and the impact, such as it was, of those agents on the small-scale residential group. It also assesses the impact on local societies of the values, instructions and demands of the wider literate world of Christianity, as delivered by local priests.