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This chapter traces the history of the referendum from its earliest origins to its present-day use or, some would say, abuse. After a tour d'horizon of the earlier use of the direct democracy, it presents a historical overview of the use of referendums from the Renaissance through to the First World War. Despite the term's earlier use, the referendum began to be used in earnest only in the nineteenth century, when the Italian Risorgimento and the early years of the Swiss Federation (after 1848) essentially owed their existence to the use of the referendum. Having analysed these cases, the chapter takes a closer look at the discussion about the referendum in the United Kingdom and the European continent. Drawing on a functionalist-inspired model, it ends with reflections and research on why there has been an apparent increase in the use of the referendum since the 1980s.
The criticism of Shelley‘s ‘The Triumph of Life’ now makes up a small library of its own, though the status of the poem as a fragment yet precludes any final closure of commentary. The article proposes that criticism of the ‘Triumph’ falls between two poles. One view, of which Paul De Man is representative, sees the Shelley of his final poem as mature, becoming skeptical of romantic uses of the language of the uncanny. The other, of which Ross Woodman is representative, sees him finally as a fascinated believer in the supernatural and transcendent. This paper argues that the poem might be better seen as a complex and subtle mixing of these two frames, a skeptical fascination that relies on Shelley‘s refined use of the Gothic mode in the poem. This unstable frame results in an evaluation of Rousseau‘s philosophy as a form of truth flawed by desire, and a counterfeit ghost of the originating ideas when it reaches the public sphere. Seen this way, Shelley places Rousseau‘s ‘shape all light’ within a pantheon of other great figures of world history as an idealist who was made into a gothic cult by those in power.
Syria to a broader world history and global community. Monitoring and Accountability Many of the strategic choices in the constitution of the mechanisms mentioned above, are informed by the objectives the monitors have in mind. Several organisations and scholars highlight the multiple objectives this data has, such as Elamein et al. , who state: It has long been recognised that robust data are crucial to verifying attacks
), ‘ Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894–1901 ’, Journal of World History , 13 : 2 , 429 – 49 , doi: 10.1353/jwh.2002.0033 . Echenberg , M. ( 2010 ), Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 ( New York : New York University Press
This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, which fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. In so doing, the book puts into question the ways in which social scientists and normative theorists diagnose ‘our’ post-Cold War times. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political and international theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new ‘untimely’ way of thinking about time in world politics.
Increased Irish-Scottish contact was one of the main consequences of the Ulster plantation (1610), yet it remains under-emphasised in the general accounts of the period. The Scottish involvement in early-to-mid seventeenth-century Ireland was both more and less pervasive than has been generally understood, just as the Irish role in western Scotland and the Isles has been mostly underappreciated.
Despite growing academic interest in English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh inter-connections sparked by the ‘New British History’ debate, the main emphasis in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘British’ historiography has been on Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish relations respectively. Exploring the Irish-Scottish world brings important new perspectives into play, helping to identify some of the limits of England’s Anglicising influence in the northern and western ‘British Isles’ and the often slight basis on which the Stuart pursuit of a new ‘British’ state and a new ‘British’ consciousness operated.
Regarding Anglo-Scottish relations, it was chiefly in Ireland that the English and Scots intermingled after 1603, with a variety of consequences, sometimes positive, often negative. This book charts key aspects of the Anglo-Scottish experience in the country down to the Restoration and greatly improves understanding of that complex and troubled relationship. The importance of the Gaelic world in Irish-Scottish connections also receives greater attention here than in previous accounts. This Gaedhealtacht played a central role in the transmission of Catholic and Protestant radicalism in Ireland and Scotland, which served as a catalyst to underlying political and ethnic tensions within the British Isles, the consequences of which were revolutionary.
current historical preoccupations? Historical attention to globalization comes in a variety of forms. Globalization in historical thinking, at least as measured by use of the word in book titles, dates to the 1990s, though the term ‘globalization’ was used from the 1960s or 1970s. 5 ‘World history’, often used synonymously with global history (and various other terms), ‘has never been a clear signifier with a stable referent.’ Jerry Bentley went on to describe the development of world history from origin myths located in a larger universe, to attempts to discover
chapter sets the scene, providing a historical sketch of the creation of new states. This chapter will also provide an overview of the world history of creating new states, of the problems they encounter – but also of how many have been successful despite dire predictions by their erstwhile parent states. The chapter – like the ones that follow it – is based on a blend of personal experiences of the author and historical examples
whole. In the first chapter the world history of the referendum is outlined. A chapter follows this on the British experience up to 2010. This was initially intended to be a short overview of the previous referendums – and a detailed analysis of more recent votes. However, when researching the book I noticed that the referendum on European Economic Community (EEC) membership in 1975 (in effect the first Brexit referendum) in important respects mirrored the vote in 2017 – and yet in other ways was completely different. This, I felt, was important, and I consequently
Machiavellian temporalisation of politics, and the possibilities it yields for understanding and judging political life. I then move on to draw a contrast between Bacon’s ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ and Newton’s Unitarian chronology of world history. Both of these accounts remove political temporality from the cyclical rhythms of Machiavelli but in very different ways. Bacon sees science as the key to a new time of unfettered progress, in which the chronos of nature is trumped by the kairos of human invention. In contrast, Newton’s science is put to use in order to