Search Results

This study focuses on the historical configuration of territorial borders and functional boundaries of the European nation states, and interprets integration as a process of transcendence, redefinition, and shift of those same boundaries that alters the nature of the nation states’ domestic political structures. The core of the argument concerns the relationship between the institutional design of the new Brussels centre, the boundary redefinitions that result from its political production, and the consequences of both these processes on the established national and emerging European political structures. The EU is interpreted through three key conceptual tools: ‘centre formation’, ‘system building’, and ‘political structuring’. The ‘centre formation’ — with limited administrative and fiscal capabilities and strong regulatory and judicial capabilities — is not accompanied by ‘system building’ in the field of cultural integration, social sharing institutions, and participation rights, that is, by institutions forcing its components to stay within it beyond the mere instrumental calculations. Given that for any new centre a balance must exist between its system building capacity and the scope and reach of its political production, the argument is that the ambitious political production of the EU is clearly out of balance with its weak system building capacity. As far as the ‘political structuring’ is concerned, this work argues that the institutional design of the Union and its weak system building militate to date against any stable form of political structuring for its representative actors, while its growing political production tends to undermine national mechanisms of political representation and legitimation. Under these conditions, any institutional democratization without political structuring may turn into facade electioneering, at best, or dangerous experiments, at worst. In the view of classical sociology — that takes the existence of a certain overlap between social identities, political boundaries, and social practices as a precondition for establishing political agency and a ‘rational’ political order — the EU is both a source of problems but also a possible solution to them. It can be seen as a project for regaining some degree of coherence between extended social practices, social identities, solidarity ties, and rules of deliberation at the European level. Most of the ideas expressed in this book show how problematic this project is believed to be.

This book examines the political thought of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Iran, India, China, Greece, Rome, and early Christianity from prehistory to c.200 CE. The most common discourse was sacred monarchy, ranging from absolutism in Egypt to a conditional mandate in China. Justice, the rule of law, and meritocracy were generally regarded as essential. ‘The people’ were seen as recipients of royal beneficence. The exceptions were Greece and Rome; here democracy and liberty were invented. Theories of class evolved in India and China, and of the nation in Israel. Stoics and Cicero saw humanity as a single unit. Christianity revolutionized moral discourse. Philosophy, using logic, evidence, and dialectic, developed in both China and Greece. Confucius and Mozi argued for ‘humaneness’ and ethical consensus, ‘Legalists’ for coercion, realpolitik, and an authoritarian state. Plato and Aristotle, followed by Polybius and Cicero in Rome, initiated ‘Western’ political philosophy and science. Practical politics was developed by Aristotle and the Indian Kautilya. Chinese and Greek thinkers investigated the origin and purpose of the state. This book covers political philosophy, religious ideology, public ethics, constitutional theory, and official and popular political culture.

Dangdut Stories is a social and musical history of dangdut, Indonesia's most popular music, within a range of broader narratives about social class, gender, ethnicity and nation in post-independence Indonesia (1945-present). The book shows how dangdut evolved from a debased form of urban popular music to a prominent role in Indonesian cultural politics and the commercial music industry. Throughout the book the voices and experiences of musicians take center stage in shaping the book's narrative. Quoted material from interviews, detailed analysis of music and song texts, and ethnography of performance illuminate the stylistic nature of the music and its centrality in public debates about Islam, social class relations, and the role of women in post-colonial Indonesia. Dangdut Stories is the first musicological study to examine the stylistic development of dangdut music itself, using vocal style, melody, rhythm, harmony, form, and song texts to articulate symbolic struggles over meaning in the realm of culture. The book illuminates historical changes in musical style, performance practice, and social meanings from the genre's origins to the present day. Developed during the early 1970s, an historical treatment of the genre's musical style, performance practice, and social meanings is long overdue.

With the opening of sea routes in the 15th century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early 17th century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish Empire. This book traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late 15th century to its fragmentation in the middle of the 17th, and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, private reflections and public arguments. This account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nation took up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade.

Spanning the last quarter century, this book examines the impact the United Nations Security Council has had on Iraq - and Iraq’s impact on the Security Council. Told largely in chronological fashion, five phases of the story are here discerned. The first phase deals with the Council’s role as Cold War peacemaker during the Iran-Iraq war. The second phase involves its response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The third phase is characterized by ‘creeping unilateralism’, occurring within the context of a more multidisciplinary approach to peace operations. The fourth phase covers the period between 9/11 to the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. The fifth phase focuses on the Council’s efforts to find its feet in Iraq, and its contemplation of reform in its way of doing business.

This book focuses on the relationship between conservative Protestants and social power in the U.S. The book, which is particularly concerned with which sorts of power relationships seem natural and which do not, is based on fieldwork (conducted in the early 1990s), in three Philadelphia churches: Oak Grove Church, Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, and the Philadelphia Church of Christ. The data drawn from that fieldwork suggests that in the early 1990s, Bible‐carrying Christian churches tended to naturalize (to various degrees) the authority of heterosexuals and men. The data also suggested that under certain (relatively rare) circumstances Bible‐carrying Christian churches denaturalized the authority of ministers, corporations, and nation‐states.

Writing more than one hundred years ago, African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speculated that the great dilemma of the twentieth century would be the problem of “the color line.” Nowhere was the dilemma of racial discrimination more entrenched—and more complex—than South Africa. This book looks at South Africa’s freedom struggle in the years surrounding African decolonization, and it uses the global apartheid debate to explore the way new nation-states changed the international community during the mid-twentieth century. At the highpoint of decolonization, South Africa’s problems shaped a transnational conversation about nationhood. Arguments about racial justice, which crested as Europe relinquished imperial control of Africa and the Caribbean, elided a deeper contest over the meaning of sovereignty, territoriality, and development. This contest was influenced—and had an impact on—the United States. Initially hopeful that liberal international institutions would amicably resolve the color line problem, Washington lost confidence as postcolonial diplomats took control of the U.N. agenda. The result was not only America’s abandonment of the universalisms that propelled decolonization, but also the unravelling of the liberal order that remade politics during the twentieth century. Based on research in African, American, and European archives, this book advances a bold new interpretation about African decolonization’s relationship to American power. The book promises to shed light on U.S. foreign relations with the Third World and recast our understanding of liberal internationalism’s fate after World War II.

This book studies modern Alsatian history using gender as a category of historical analysis, and the first to record the experiences of the region's women from 1870 to 1946. Relying on an extensive array of documentary, visual and literary material, national and regional publications, oral testimonies, and previously-unused archival sources gathered in France, Germany and Britain, the book contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between gender, the nation and citizenship, and between nationalism and feminism. It does so by focusing on the roles, both passive and active, that women played in the process of German and French nation-building in Alsace. The work also critiques and corrects the long-held assumptions that Alsatian women were the preservers, after 1871, of a French national heritage in the region, and that women were neglected or disregarded by policy-makers concerned with the consolidation of German, and later French, loyalties. Women were in fact seen as important agents of nation-formation and treated as such. In addition, all the categories of social action implicated in the nation-building process — confession, education, socialization, the public sphere, the domestic setting, the iconography of regional and national belonging — were themselves gendered. Thus nation-building projects impacted asymmetrically on men and women, with far-reaching consequences. Having been ‘nationalized’ through different ‘rounds of restructuring’ than men, the women of Alsace were, and continue to be excluded from national and regional histories, as well as from public memory and official commemoration. Marianne or Germania questions, and ultimately challenges, these practices.