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This chapter examines the historical factors that explain Germany's resistance to multiculturalism, which are partly rooted in the nature of the German welfare state and German labour relations. It considers the more recent cautious opening towards ideas of multiculturalism. In the past decade, the German left (particularly the Social Democratic Party) has had an intense internal debate about whether to embrace MCPs, and how such a shift towards multiculturalism would affect its electoral chances and its traditional social policy goals. The chapter examines the different positions adopted in this debate, the basis for fears that MCPs might jeopardize welfare state goals, and the factors shaping the resulting political strategies. It is shown that while there is no evidence that MCPs have weakened the welfare state, the German case suggests that fears of such an impact can weaken the political alliances necessary to introduce or sustain MCPs.

Following the guilty verdict in the trial of the Wilmington Ten, a broad based movement developed in North Carolina, the larger United States, and the world to overturn the convictions on appeal and set them free. The movement to free the Wilmington Ten in all its phases developed along multiple independent but intersecting paths. How interested parties along these paths, like the United Church of Christ, the Commission for Racial Justice, the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression organized themselves and cooperated and competed tells us much about the African American political landscape in the 1970s. From community-, school-, and church-based associations to political parties built on leftist and nationalist lines to the quickening of a stratum of black elected officials, the manners in which the campaigns to free the Wilmington Ten unfolded reveal the ways power was accrued and spent and lost. This chapter discloses the efforts of many organizations in the movement to bring the Wilmington Ten before an international audience to pressure the United States government to free the Ten. The chapter also discusses the Wilmington Ten’s continuing legal appeal, which continued to bring to light evidence of prosecutorial and government misconduct.

This chapter describes the events which led to the fall of the house of Leofwine. It also concludes the book's treatment of the power of earls by showing how Eadwine and Morcar were deprived of it between 1066 and 1071. They lacked influence at the Conqueror's court; their political alliances were smashed; they gradually lost their ability to exercise meaningful power in the shires and towns which lay within their earldoms; they were forced to cede territory and property to the Conqueror's followers; their family's network of religious patronage fell apart; and they proved unable to provide good lordship to their men. In short, all of the power structures which had supported the house of Leofwine between 994 and 1066 buckled and collapsed during the first five years of the Conqueror's reign, and this explains why the house itself eventually fell.

This chapter looks at the Muslim world and Europe during World War I. The mechanisms of the political alliances in Europe during the twentieth century, combined with national passions and the sense among many that war was inevitable, reveal how, this time, European diplomacy was unable to avoid a war whose intensity and capacity for destruction was unimaginable. The chapter looks at the major players from the Islamic world who had become involved in the war, particularly as tensions between the European nations as well as the Muslim states chafing under their domination. Hence, the chapter also looks at the Muslim efforts at emancipation from European rule during this time.

The Islamic banking in the Arab World had created a new political alliance that unexpectedly emerged out of the working relationships between the rich and wealthy on one hand and many shariah scholars on the other. These relationships continue to invigorate shariah scholars who influence substantial segments of public opinion in most Muslim countries. One consequence of these relationships is that scholars encourage their followers and the Muslim public to use Islamic banks. This chapter discusses the history of this new alliance. It examines the factors that contribute to the needs of each of the two sides, the transformation of the lifestyle and intellectual outlooks of allied shariah scholars that has become redirected towards business, and their manner of shaping public opinion, which resulted in new clientele for the Islamic banks. Also included in the chapter are the effect of the new socio-economic coherence on de-politicisation and on the removal of political stigma from the several layers of Islamic movement in Muslim countries, as well as the effect of this new alliance on cooperation and competition between governments and Islamist oppositions.

This chapter examines the fundamental features of the ceremonial gift as well as its purpose. Marcel Mauss deserves credit for constituting the epistemological problem of the ritual gift based on the ethnographic documents available at the beginning of the twentieth century, and connecting them to the testimonies of ancient Indian, Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic literatures. While he was not the first to consider this phenomenon, he was the first to systematically gather the relevant data and propose a model according to which gift exchanges appear as a major social fact. He even called it a “total social fact.” Among the mass of data he collected through his readings, three sets emerge, each characterized by a term used by a population involved. These include the great cycles of gift exchanges (kula) in the Trobriand Islands, a Melanesian archipelago; potlach, the agonistic exchange among the native populations of the northwest coast of America; and the hau, which comes from an inquiry conducted among the Maori of New Zealand. What is at stake in the facts discussed by Mauss is an intense bond between parties, public prestige granted and gained, and the conclusion of an alliance. The alliance established or renewed in ritual exchanges involves the public life of the group; as such, it is a political alliance. The ceremonial gift is thus meant to be reciprocated, since an alliance is necessarily reciprocal.

This chapter and the previous one discuss the sophisticated multiyear campaign to free the Wilmington Ten carried out by religious and secular black nationalists, the Communist-affiliated National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, Amnesty International, and the Workers Viewpoint Organization of the Maoist new communist movement. In North Carolina, the Commission for Racial Justice, linked the case of the Ten with other local issues, such as police brutality and discrimination in the criminal justice system, and the Wilmington Ten became a locus for radicals and revolutionaries as well as aspiring politicians. Across the country, different organizations connected the case of the Wilmington Ten to labor unions, church groups, student organizations, and elected officials who expressed extreme skepticism of the federal government in the wake of Watergate. Combining education, agitation, and direct action, the major organizations hounded President Jimmy Carter and North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt and forced them to take corrective action. Additionally, chapters four and five place the campaign to free the Wilmington Ten in an international context and demonstrate the ways in which politically conscious actors utilized the contradictions inherent in the Cold War and President Carter’s human rights foreign policy to build international pressure to free the Ten.

This chapter concludes the book by briefly examining Flo Kennedy’s multifaceted political actions in the mid-to-late 1970s and the early 1980s. Specifically focusing on her organizing against racism, sexism and a range of other oppressions during the 1984 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the International Year of the Woman conferences in Mexico City, Mexico and Canberra, Australia and through COYOTE, an organization in support of sex workers. Kennedy’s protests and flamboyant self-presentation have puzzled some organizers and scholars. In part, this confusion accounts for some of the reasons why Kennedy has been largely ignored and why her theoretical and strategic insights have not been incorporated into radical political perspectives of feminist and Black Power histories. To the people who worked with and learned from Kennedy, she was a teacher, a catalyst, a lawyer, a cheerleader, a bridge to other organizers and to expansive and broad concepts, an exacting critic, a complex thinker, and a sharp leader who animated political engagement and made political organizing less intimidating and far more appealing. Her black feminist intersectional analysis enlarged the scope of possible political alliances and both broadened and deepened the promise of radical social transformation.

This chapter examines the mostly unarmed struggle waged in Cotabato from 1980 until 1986 between the political alliances expressed spatially by the polar positions in Campo Muslim. It discusses the emergence of a new group of well-educated and politically active Islamic clerics called ulama, and evaluates the reactions of urban Muslims to their teachings. The chapter also highlights the emergence of a consolidated Muslim counterelite who publicly challenged the political legitimacy of the datu establishment.

This chapter tracks a network of marriages that tied together the Vaisnava-Buddhist households of Kuch Bihar, Tripura, Manipur, Burma, and Assam in the late eighteenth century. It shows the conditions under which East India Company officials delegitimized particular conjugal arrangements that prolonged the political alliance between two different monastic households and lineage. The chapter details the fortunes of one particular marriage by levirate that was dissolved by the Company after 1833. This not only denied a widow her rightful inheritance but also escalated conflict in the lands held by different Vaisnava Hindu households across the hills (Kachar) of Assam, Manipur, and Tripura.

This chapter explores contending visions of Creek nationhood. It turns its sights to the small-scale farmers who made up the majority of the Creek Nation—a nation that included, in the wake of emancipation, a sizable black citizenry. The chapter notes that this small farmer majority, both black and Indian, had a common stake in defending Creek national land. It observes that that shared interest underlays the construction of a remarkable political alliance that resisted the efforts by the elite to consolidate wealth and power and impose a form of racial nationalism on the Creek Nation. The chapter notes that the alliance between black Creeks and conservative Creeks upheld two fundamental notions: that being Creek meant belonging to a polity, not a race; and that the lands were to be defended as national property available to all who were part of the nation.

This chapter explores how trade and political alliances forged an interethnic Indian world ultimately leading to the dominance of a few key groups, including the powerful Quechan alliance along the Lower Colorado River. Emerging late in the seventeenth century, the power of the Quechans derived from Indigenous trading networks forged during the onset of the Little Ice Age in the fourteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Quechan and Maricopa alliances engaged in trading partnerships and competition along these routes. Ultimately, the advantageous location of the Quechans allowed them to emerge as one of the most dominant groups. They fiercely held onto this power throughout the eighteenth century even in the face of Spanish attempts to seize control of their territory. The chapter concludes with the Quechan victory and expulsion of the Spaniards in 1781.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is British politician Richard Wainwright and his role in the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats. Wainwright joined the Party at its lowest ebb and he helped lead its return from the wilderness when others drifted elsewhere. He also witnessed the transformation of the Party, including its alliance with the Labour Party and its alliance and merger with the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP) to form the Liberal Democrats.

This chapter focuses on the political alliance of the Liberal Party (LP) with the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The launch of the SDP, led by Roy Jenkins, in March 1981 presented Liberals with a dilemma. Liberal Party leader David Steel decided to work with the new party through an electoral and policy alliance instead of trying to defeat the well-resourced organisation. This chapter explains that Richard Wainwright did not dismiss or disown the Alliance in public and only tried to get as much out of it as possible, until circumstances presented an opportunity to move on. It also suggests that from an early stage Wainwright foresaw the end of the SDP, and the subsuming of much of its membership into a single, liberal, party.

This chapter exposes the changes that took place during the Hollande presidency. Hollande’s term marked the accomplishment of a long-term strategy of the right wing of the so-called ‘government left’: the traditional left political alliance in a coalition government was no longer considered to be necessary, and the transformation of political alliances and the search for a new social base, different from the traditional left social bloc, was a dominant orientation of the presidency. At the same time, Hollande’s presidency represented the intensification of the contradiction between the economic and structural policy that the PS-led government wanted to implement and the electorate’s expectations of Hollande.

This chapter focuses on the birth of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), one of the most important Asian American political groups of the sixties. AAPA’s coining of the term “Asian American” helped create a new social movement, the Asian American Movement (AAM), and a new identity based on racial pride, political resistance, and alliance building across ethnic (pan-Asian unity) and racial borders (Third World solidarity). The membership of AAPA was student and community. AAPA represented the Asians during the Third World strike and helped form the Asian American Studies program at UC Berkeley. Aoki played a vital role in the development of Berkeley’s AAPA. He further influenced AAPA’s ideological development through his socialist politics and political associations with Black radicalism.

Chapter 7 discusses the effectiveness or otherwise of historical leadership attempts to promote a progressive agenda in American politics. It specifically focuses on the informal alliance between Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slavery activists of his day, which led ultimately to the end of slavery in the United States. It was, to say the least, a very awkward and contentious alliance, but the point is that that was precisely its virtue. At issue was the question of how far and how fast forces of progress might go before the forces of reaction and resistance brought matters to a halt and further entrenched the status quo. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how difficult good democratic leadership (defined in terms of effectiveness) can be, and how dependent on crucial political alliances.