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Chapter 2 is devoted to a detailed description of Sicilian word order variation. It is argued that word order alternations consistently correspond to overt manifestations of the different information structures of the sentence. The impact and influence on syntax both of the discourse context and of the informational common ground shared by the interlocutors is examined in relation to new and old information, showing that specific syntactic structures are paired with particular pragmatic conditions. Special attention will be paid to the syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of Focus Fronting (FF), including the syntactic categories and the sentence types most commonly associated with FF and a discussion of the relationship between FF and notions such as exhaustivity and contrast.

This chapter discusses some of the most urgent challenges to gender equality policies in Europe. The European gender-mainstreaming strategy represents one of the few attemptsto promoting gender equality through a transnational legislative framework.However,theachievements reached so far cannot be given for granted. Political changes, as the rise of right-wing Eurosceptic parties supporting traditional-family models and ethnocentric views, may address new political agendas in which gender equality is marginalised. Furthermore, economic changes can impact on family patterns and gender arrangements, with policy budgets affected as well. The chapter also points out the technocratic approachto gender equality adopted by European laws,whichneglected the cumulative and simultaneous effect of multiple inequities. However, gender often intersects with other differences that can exacerbate inequities. The chapter discusses therefore the gendered consequences of the economic crisis and of defamilisation policies, implemented to deal with the ageing population; and the risks connected with the adoption of ethnocentric, gender-blind policies in the management of the refugees crisis and integration.

This chapter points out strength and weak elements of the gender mainstreaming strategy. On the one hand it represents one of the few attempts of installing a transnational strategy for gender equality proposing shared values and standards.Such a strategy boosted the development of a formal recognition of gender equality rights in institutions, workplaces and individual opinions. However, itentailsalso controversial aspects. For example, it still faces missteps in the conceptualisation of gender equality, with relevant consequences in the achievement of results. Furthermore, gender-equality policies have been marginalised progressively in the past decade as a result of political and institutional choices implemented at the European level and today risk being even more overlooked by the political debates at the national level. The future of gender equality depends by the awareness that establishing a legal basis for it is only the first step of a broader process that, to be effective, needs to promote a substantial cultural change within political, economic and social institutions, as well as public opinion.

The focus of this chapter is the Church–state–citizen relations from the 1950s to 2004, looking at how the Church leadership emerged as the mediator between Coptic citizenry and the state. It argues that the diversification of centers of power has complicated this pact and made it both more ambiguous. This chapter also addresses the marginalization of Copts in civil and political society, starting with Nasser’s policies of centralization, and the Islamization of political space from the 1970s.

During the colonial period, French and American colonies struggled to survive in the New World. As these two separate and distinct cultures developed, major changes in politics and socio-economics contributed to changes and adaptations to the French mentality in the Midwest. The Treaty of Paris, Louisiana Purchase, German immigration, and early twentieth century xenophobia influenced the French mentality, often marginalizing the culture. In order for the culture to survive, elements like language became less important than traditions and customs like La Guiannée.

This chapter shows that many arguments for the UBI extol its capacity to boost employment. A UBI motivated by this goal would enhance distributive justice, but would fail to tackle three problems with work: the mismatch between the social recognition and the contribution that a job makes to society; the marginalization of those who cannot or will not perform paid work, even though many contribute to society through unpaid activities; and the pressure that paid work puts on the non-paid activities that make up a rich and rewarding life. To counter these risks, we need to argue for the UBI in conjunction with a critique of the work society, and as a measure that can take us beyond it.

Who were these people, living in Mao’s China and prepared to ally themselves with it politically in an era of Cold War hostility? Blanket generalizations do not adequately explain their motivations. Some, as communist internationalists, saw the PRC as a bright new hope for socialism and were keen to participate in building a revolutionary society. Others described their underlying motivation as ‘humanitarianism’: China had turned them to communism rather than the other way round. Having lived in China since the 1930s or even earlier, they were not the only people to conclude that the Communist Party seemed to offer the best way out of the country’s poverty and corruption. Later arrivals included émigrés from Cold War McCarthyism. And for a few women, in particular, the decision to live under Mao was closely linked to their personal relationships.

As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the long-term residents were active participants in the PRC’s ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ (or ‘friendship diplomacy’) which, like its Soviet counterpart, was directed towards influencing foreign public opinion, especially in the West. In her book A History of China’s Foreign Propaganda 1949–1966, PRC journalist and author Xi Shaoying saw the long-term residents, along with short-term invited ‘friends of China’, as playing an integral role in the government’s ‘foreign propaganda work’. In the West, the long-termers’ most contentious activity was their support for the PRC against their own governments.

To outsiders, the long-term residents seemed tightly knit, conscious of their group identity and wary of Westerners who did not share the mantle of ‘foreign comrade’ or ‘international friend’. But the small community also had its internal dynamics, reflecting the length of time that people had spent in China as well as their nationality, personality and political attitudes—even within the socialist range. The turbulent politics of the era, including the Sino-Soviet split, also impinged on relations within the community, while the Cultural Revolution had a dramatic impact on individuals’ lives when their official designation as comrades and friends became subordinated to that as suspect foreigners.

On 24 February 1954, twenty-one American GIs and a British marine crossed the border from North Korea into the PRC. Whatever the individual differences in the men’s explanations, there was a common theme that to some extent accorded with the emotive accusations of brainwashing. After taking over the camps from the North Korean army, the Chinese pursued their so-called leniency policy which, instead of punishing soldiers as the enemy, was directed at convincing them of the superiority of communism and the evils of their own government. The United States and Britain admitted that their soldiers had not been trained for this type of POW experience. There were also strong disincentives for returning to the United States—or even to Britain. To Western governments the men were collaborators, making them liable to prosecution.

Overall, China had failed to live up to the former POWs’ hopes. The grand socialist narrative of international peace and equality for all seemed to have little relevance to their everyday lives. The daily grind, whether working on a farm or in a factory—or even the hard slog of learning Chinese—was not quite the adventure that some had anticipated. There was also the low standard of living and the realities of everyday life in a strictly controlled society, even without the sense of isolation from the outside world.

To many other Western residents, the lives of embassy staff and their families seemed a world away from their own. Outside was Maoist Peking, its blue and grey cotton clothed inhabitants battling to get on crowded buses or cycling past the city’s low grey buildings and billboards urging them to ‘build socialism faster, better and more economically’. The world within was light and bright, a reproduction of a modern Western apartment with all its trappings—and in the evening the scene of many a party as people ate, drank and tried to enjoy themselves in defiance of the austere world outside.

Despite the restrictions, there was a small amount of ongoing personal contact, at least before the Cultural Revolution. Almost without exception, these friendships were with people who, as diplomats expressed it, were ‘licensed for contact’ with foreigners. Usually from the academic or cultural world, they often had long-standing Western connections which were virtually impossible to maintain in the new political environment. In the political environment of the Mao era—and even for a while beyond—ongoing personal correspondence between a Chinese person and a Western diplomat was highly unusual.

From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971, President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what progress, if any, had been made towards the normalization of US-China relations. Peking’s diplomats, like some of their colleagues elsewhere in the world, did not always see eye-to-eye with their foreign ministries. There was little chance of their becoming overly attached to Communist China, as the Japanologists and Arabists were sometimes accused of doing for Japan and Arab countries. At the same time, living and breathing the PRC led some diplomats to regard Chinese Communism as being rather more nuanced—and the government somewhat less belligerent—than the Cold War images portrayed in the West, particularly the United States.

Western correspondents were in some ways even less welcome than diplomats. Embassy reports finished up in foreign office files but correspondents’ despatches were in the public arena, potentially undermining the images of new China that the government was trying so hard to project. On assuming power, the Communists had issued a series of bans on Western news organizations. Official images to the outside world were presented through the government news agency Xinhua, Peking Radio, and the handful of foreign language publications.

Mao’s China was a striking example of Ulf Hannerz’s research finding that foreign correspondents were likely to stick together more closely ‘in cities where there were few of them’. This was particularly the case when ‘they were living under tough conditions and perhaps in an adversarial or at least closely guarded relationship with the host society and especially its government’. With a paucity of information at their disposal, Peking’s correspondents often shared whatever was available.