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Chapter 11 draws the book to a close with an overall conclusion. It considers the lessons to be learned from the PSOE's experience in office and opposition and the difficulties experienced by social democratic parties since the start of the economic and financial crisis in 2008. The chapter is brought to a close with a consideration of the PSOE's prospects under the leadership of Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba.

Synge combines incisive observation and human sympathy with sleight of hand in The Aran Islands. When narrating his introduction to the supposedly primitive West of Ireland (1898–1901), he adopts multiple perspectives echoing those of earlier visitors. Synge’s eclectic approach creates inconsistencies and tensions, such as alternately deploring the consequences of poverty and of modernisation. The problem is mitigated, but not resolved, by largely ignoring the social and political implications of resisting ‘progress’. Though artistically satisfying, The Aran Islands is subtly deceptive, exaggerating the persistence of cultural and linguistic traditions and the separation of islanders from mainland practices, and drastically understating the impact of modernisation. This essay explores some of the sources, both public and familial, from which Synge may have derived his conflicting attitudes towards poverty and modernisation. It also offers novel evidence of the surprising extent to which the Aran Islands had already lost their cultural insularity.

This chapter offers a reading of novels from the European literary periphery, proposing that the realities of combined and uneven development – often conceived as characterising the non-European world – are in fact constitutive of European modernism also, and remain so in the contemporary moment. The works examined range across peripheral Europe and span the ‘long 20th century’, from Dostoevsky's time to our own: authors considered include Dostoevsky, Pist’anek, Hamsun, Baroja, Laxness, Kelman, and Stasiuk. Again, as in the previous chapters, the formal features of combined unevenness are decoded as registering the complex, fissiparous social relations characteristic of relatively ‘backward’ formations caught up in the vortex of capitalist modernisation.

Under President George W. Bush, the White House had been ambitious in its earlier years as it sought to redraw the contours of domestic policy. The tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the No Child Left Behind education reform and the appointment of conservative judges to federal courts all marked significant political victories. Furthermore, the administration had embarked on major legislative efforts to reform the United States's two biggest public policy programmes, Medicare, which provides health care for the nation's seniors, and Social Security, the public pension scheme. These were both bold political advances on to terrain normally occupied by the Democratic Party. In 2003, Bush signed into law the Medicare Modernisation Act, but in 2005 the plan to transform the Social Security system made no legislative progress, despite the elections of 2004 confirming unified Republican government. This chapter examines the ideological implications of the Bush administration's reform efforts for Medicare and Social Security and analyses why there was such a difference in the final outcomes across policy areas and between Bush's first and second terms.

This chapter explores the relationship between modernisation, space and photography in contemporary France, and the privileged role acquired by photography as a means of portraying a sense of national identity through spatial forms. It focuses in particular on Paysages Photographies (1989), the substantial photo-book which emerged out of the work of the Mission photographique de la DATAR between 1983 and 1988. The Mission photographique was commissioned in the early 1980s by the government’s spatial planning agency, the DATAR (Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale), which had been founded in 1963 to drive forward the modernisation of French territory. Its aim was to record the consequences of two decades of spatial transformation and production in France, and by implication marking the end of a triumphant phase of activity. The chapter considers how Paysages Photographies frames and presents the spatial transformations brought about by modernisation; how it captures the impact of spatial planning on the French landscape; and the visual forms taken by planned and modernised space. It explores how different photographers responded to the environments they encountered and, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, create an ambivalent sense of spatial transformation as both historical wreckage and half-realised dream.

The introduction starts by defining the theoretical framework in the context of recent and current debates on ‘multiple modernities’, which often fail to include Latin America. This section then moves on to discuss the relevance of and relation between key categories, primarily those of ‘civilisation’ and ‘decadence’ − which were increasingly used in association with each other − with respect to the more recent notion of degeneration which provided them with a scientific analytical foundation. In the late nineteenth-century, many started to feel that ‘modern civilisation’ carried within itself the danger of deviance, especially as the medical model of social analysis became established. I discuss here how these debates culminated in the years between the mid-1890s and the early 1900s, when the process of nation-building and economic prosperity reached its peak in the Southern Cone as the rapid changes that had taken place during the previous two decades became consolidated. Among the main consequences were the growth of the urban population and the consequent rise of the so-called ‘social question’. It was during this time that the need to rethink how the idea of civilisation should be approached acquired for the first time such huge prominence in Latin America.

The introduction situates the study within the existing international and national historiographies of the postwar period, the sixties and youth. It indicates the way in which the social category of youth will be used as a lens through which social change and modernization in the Republic of Ireland can be more clearly understood.

Sentimental obituaries published after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 remark that phrases and characters from his fiction “[mingle] with our daily converse and our daily life” (Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun. 1870, p. 4). This is certainly true. However, the convivial tone of this eulogy obscures how literary afterlives were appropriated to argue for material changes to London’s built environment, the effects of which were often misaligned with Dickens’s broadly humanitarian ethos. For example, tropes, extracts, and characters from his novels were mobilised to advocate the demolition of insanitary and overcrowded slum areas, but such modernisations were rarely accompanied by the building of new housing for the displaced population. The introduction to Dickens and Demolition introduces these central concerns of the book: to trace Dickensian afterlives across multiple media and fora; to examine what role these afterlives played in urban development discourses; and to argue that fiction was part of the dialectical relations between past, present and future, through which London’s modernisation was conceived and represented. The chapter also introduces key terminology, such as remediation, appropriation, and adaptation.

For readers who are unfamiliar with the historical contexts underpinning London’s improvement in the mid-nineteenth century, Chapter 1 offers an account of the processes and problems of improvement during Dickens’s lifetime. Addressing the fragmentation of the built environment and the diverse actors and institutions who commented on and influenced metropolitan developments, it suggests that the haphazard nature of improvement in the mid-nineteenth century dovetailed generatively with Dickens’s style and popularity, and that this enabled his works to be used effectively to promote urban change. Far from suggesting that people credulously accepted Dickens’s descriptions as “realistic” accounts of contemporary London conditions, however, this chapter (and, indeed, the book as a whole) argues that mid-nineteenth-century users of Dickens treated his novels as a store of widely known imagery that could be superimposed on to the urban environment. Afterlives were self-consciously curated to enable discussion about large and complex social problems, to make users’ critiques more pointed and memorable, or to curate legible representations of the city.

The Labour Party government elected in 1997 was committed to an expansive legislative programme after almost twenty years in opposition, and was keen to ensure that the most efficient mechanisms were in place to secure that programme. To achieve this, the government established a Modernisation Committee to implement the necessary changes in parliament. A significant proportion of this Committee's time has been spent on efficiency matters similar to those explored previously by the Procedure Committee. The notion of modernisation has been utilised by the government to update and redesign procedures primarily (although not exclusively) for its own benefit. These changes have included alterations to the legislative process, adjustments to House sitting hours, and the creation of Westminster Hall as a parallel chamber. The Labour government's constitutional reform programme included a commitment to establish a select committee for the specific purpose of modernising the House of Commons.

Norton (2000) outlined three conditions that must be met before effective parliamentary reform may proceed. The first necessary condition is a window of opportunity in which reform can take place. Second, there has to be a coherent reform agenda in place that provides a package behind which MPs might organise. Third, leadership must exist to exploit the window of opportunity and promote the reform agenda. In the summer of 1998, Charter 88 complained of the ‘disappointingly slow’ pace of reform and the ‘extremely cautious’ nature of the Modernisation Committee's recommendations. The Liaison Committee, under the chairmanship of Sir Terence Higgins, used its 1997 report on the work of the select committees as an opportunity to explore the issues in greater depth. This chapter examines effectiveness in the House of Commons since 1997, focusing on various reports prepared by the Liaison Committee, the Commission to Strengthen Parliament, and the Hansard Society Commission on Parliamentary Scrutiny. It also discusses the support of the Labour Party led by Robin Cook to institute reforms in the House of Commons.

Between 1945-1989 we can trace a growing conflation of economic liberalism with social and cultural liberalism, such that social liberalism becomes engulfed by neoliberal capital and subsumed under market fundamentalism. As a consequence, there emerges a political debate about liberal societies – in Popper’s terms, ‘open societies’ – and their relation to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and institutions. However, this misses the point that, when social values are essentially monetized, the institutional values of academic freedom – characterised by an ‘open university’ - are potentially compromised. The chapter examines the historical constitution of the UK’s ‘Open University’ – as an explicitly democratising institution - and sets that against the contemporary logic of zero-sum competition, which envisages the failure and closure of some universities as a sign of the success of the national and global system. The paradox is that, as more universities open, so the range of intellectual options for critical thinking actually diminishes. The consequence is the enclosure of the intellectual commons, and the re-establishment of protected privilege and the legitimization of structural social inequality. Organisations such as the Russell Group embody this entrenching of inequality.

This chapter departs from the first highways built in Albania during WWI and passing through the Italian fascist’s regime’s road project of the 1930s, focuses on the socialist period. I propose a view of socialism from the aspect of infrastructure construction and usage and an understanding of notions of manual labour as a measure of creating socialist subjects. Moreover, in this chapter I suggest a methodological division important for the historical understanding of network infrastructure: the division between the physical disposition of the infrastructure and the flows within the network, as one does not necessarily imply the other.

The urban topography of Gjirokastër city, where part of the current ethnography was based, is under a continuous process of change during the last two decades. The city has in fact been relocated around the traffic infrastructure, centralising the road which leads to the Albanian-Greek border since the borders opened, in 1990. This appears to be a somewhat predictable spatial transformation for a city which has one third of its population living as migrants in Greece and consumes almost entirely imported Greek products since 1990. However, this transformation of the urban formation is a complex process. This chapter enlightens on how the postsocialist city is enlarged dramatically and how it is reconfigured spatially in reference to the road infrastructure. It will address two main processes, the postsocialist introduction of the car-related spatial practices and the relocation of the urban centre around the road.