The paper analyzes the collection of the Northern Irish poet Frank Ormsby entitled A Northern Spring published in 1986. On the basis of selected poems, the author of this paper aims to examine the poet’s reflections about World War II, the lives of the soldiers, and the things that remain after a military combat, which are both physical and illusive. The poems included in the volume present the author’s reflections upon the senselessness of war and dying, short lives (...) of the soldiers, the awareness of their own meaninglessness in comparison to the broader picture, and the contradictory and desperate need to be remembered nevertheless. They also show what is left of the soldiers and the war, as well as how life goes on, with or without them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PEACE EDUCATION AND THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT André Lascaris Dominican Theological Center, Nijmegen The Northern Irish conflict can be interpreted as an anachronism. This is true in many aspects. However, in the last ten years we were confronted with many "anachronistic" conflicts: in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, Algeria, Colombia, and Afghanistan, to mention only some. In our postmodern times the division of the world into two rather (...) neat halves with two centers of power has gone, the nation state is weakening and in many societies the social glue seems to be losing its cohesive force. We have to live together in pluralistic societies in which we are all a minority at times. Wars between states become less likely, butcivil wars are on the increase. Terrorism becomes a power against which the traditional armies and their weapons are quite useless in spite of many technological developments. The ancient laws concerningthe protection of women and children in wartime are becoming obsolete. Women are invited to get involved in the armed forces. The child soldier is a well-known phenomenon. In our western society a child's world, which exists in isolation from the adult world, is no longer a possibility. Some lessons learned in dealing with theNorthern Irish conflict might turn out to be worthwhile taking up in other situations. In this essay, I reflect with the help ofthe mimetic theory on peace work done by some Dutch people on behalfofNorthern Ireland between 1973 and 1992. The Northern Irish conflict as such is not the subject ofthis paper; the mimetic interpretation of this conflict was admirably covered by people such as Duncan Morrow and the late Frank Wright to which I refer the reader in my bibliography. I will concentrate on the educational aspects ofDutch peace work done in the Northern Irish context. Here it suffices to say that the 136André Lascaris Northern Irish conflict is not a religious one, though religious labels are being used. It is aconflict between two cultures, an Irish one and an AngloSaxon or British one. I. Dutch peace work on behalf ofNorthern Ireland A. A short history In 1973 I was invited to become a member of staff of a conference for influential Northern Irishmen in the Netherlands. Glenn Williams, then secretary general of the KEK (Conference of European Churches) had asked the Dutch Council ofChurches whether it could do something on behalf of Northern Ireland. After some consultation Williams asked the Dutch adult education center 'De Haaf to accommodate "mixed Roman Catholic and Protestant Irish groups in a quiet and spiritual atmosphere." The director of this center, Aat van Rhijn, a Presbyterian minister, asked me to participate in the conference because he wanted a Catholic priest to make the Roman Catholic Northern Irishmen feel represented on the staff. A laywoman, Hermine Keuning, was the third member of the staff. The Dutch Reformed Church provided money. In April 1973 a visit was made to Belfast and contact was established with the Irish Council ofChurches; it soon became our Northern Irish counterpart. In Septembera firstconference was held, quickly followed by a second one. From participants of the first conference a new request for a conference was made and after this one even more conferences were organized, altogether 18 between 1973 and 1983. We worked with neighborhood groups, politicians, paramilitaries, social workers, police officers, adult educators, social workers, journalists and editors, Catholic and Protestant clergymen. In the conferences ofthe protestant politicians and the clergy it was not possible to have a mixed group; we had to be content with having some either Catholic or Protestant "observers" at the conference. Inthe late seventiesthesecurity situation inNorthern Ireland improved. The necessity oftraveling to the Netherlands to have a conference became less evident. Because our work remained in demand, we organized weekends in Northern Ireland itself from 1981 onwards, mainly in Corrymeela, an ecumenical adult education center near Ballycastle. Money was coming from several sources, but mainly from the Dutch Reformed Church. To handle the money well we decided in 1975 to become a trust: the "Dutch Northern Irish Advisory Committee." It was typical ofthis trustthat its constitution stipulated that no conference or any Peace Education andthe Northern Irish Conflict137 other activity... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Irish Republican Army (IRA) sometimes claim that their violent actions are sanctioned by traditional just war doctrine. To what extent is this true? To answer this question it is necessary to have a clear grasp of the principles of just war and of the situation in Northern Ireland to which they are to be applied. This is done in the first sections, and it is then argued that just war sanctions some kinds of violence in Northern (...) Ireland but only those of direct self‐defence. Violence outside the borders of Northern Ireland or for the sake of Irish Unity is not justifiable. Consequently the IRA must be viewed, in terms of just war theory at any rate, as in principle illegitimate, even though some of their actions are defensible. Finally it is suggested that non‐violence, after the pattern of Gandhi, while not required by justice might nevertheless be preferable. (shrink)

For over 150 years liberal optimism has dominated theories of war and violence. It has been repeatedly argued that war and violence either are declining or will shortly decline. There have been exceptions, especially in Germany and more generally in the first half of the twentieth century, but there has been a recent revival of such optimism, especially in the work of Azar Gat, John Mueller, Joshua Goldstein, and Steven Pinker who all perceive a long-term decline in war and violence (...) through history, speeding up in the post-1945 period. Critiquing Pinker’s statistics on war fatalities, I show that the overall pattern is not a decline in war, but substantial variation between periods and places. War has not declined and current trends are slightly in the opposite direction. The conventional view is that civil wars in the global South have largely replaced inter-state wars in the North, but this is misleading since there is major involvement in most civil wars by outside powers, including those of the North. There is more support for their view that homicide has declined in the long-term, at least in the North of the world (with the United States lagging somewhat). This is reinforced by technological improvements in long-distance weaponry and the two transformations have shifted war, especially in the North, from being “ferocious” to “callous” in character. This renders war less visible and less central to Northern culture, which has the deceptive appearance of being rather pacific. Viewed from the South the view has been bleaker both in the colonial period and today. Globally war and violence are not declining, but they are being transformed. (shrink)

The discussion of the American Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, reopened by John Ashworth’s recent work, needs to be based on a more explicit conceptualisation of what the category does, and does not, involve. This essay offers one such conceptualisation. It then deals with two key issues raised by the process of bourgeois revolution in the United States: the relationship between the War of Independence and the Civil War, and whether the nature of the South made conflict unavoidable. It (...) then argues that the American Revolution is unique for two reasons: the non-feudal nature of Southern society and the fact that the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, unlike their European contemporaries, were still prepared to behave in a revolutionary way. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How should just war theory be applied to assess a community's claim to defend itself? The IRA's claim to be fighting a just war to end British rule in Northern Ireland is upheld against the objection (e.g. by Simpson in this Journal, 1986) that they have a right only to self‐defence against indigenous tyranny. Under just war theory no unclarity concerning the alien status of British rule could render the IRA claim unjustifiable: only the well‐grounded denial of its (...) alien status might serve (though this is doubtful). But if that denial is argued for by identifying a separate British community in Ireland then the IRA must be granted a right to repel alien occupation of nationalist areas. However the IRA's rejection of the ‘two communities’ view can be defended; for what constitutes a single community is subject to moral considerations. Accordingly a genuine community's claim to self‐defence is against being wronged, rather than harmed. It is concluded that just war theory cannot be applied without antecedent moral judgements identifying the community potentially wronged. (shrink)

For the past 5 years I have been photographing and interviewing men who play games based on contemporary conflicts. The games attempt to re-create scenarios that the US military is engaged in around the world like the "Hunt for Osama Bin Laden" that took place three years ago on a campground in Northern, Virginia. On a sociological level, the work speaks about the way that trauma and conflict penetrate a culture sheltered from the horrors of war. Many of the (...) scenarios are created and inspired from news reports and images and the stages where the games are played are often a poor imitation of the original scenes from photographs. The book will bring together the series of 24 photographs with essays discussing and analyzing the influence of the media, particularly photographs and video, on the culture at large and how conflict is "discussed" in the visual realm. (shrink)

On July 12, 2006, the Hezbollah terrorist organization attacked two Israeli Defense Forces' armored Hummer jeeps patrolling along the border with gunfire and explosives, in the midst of massive shelling attacks on Israel's north. Three soldiers were killed in the attack and two were taken hostage. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) began heavy artillery and tank fire. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert convened the government on Wednesday night, June 12, 2006 to decide Israel's reaction. The government agreed that the attack had (...) created a completely new situation on the northern border, and that Israel must take steps that will "exact a price", and restore its deterrence. The Israeli-Hezbollah War had started after one rushed and short governmental meeting, without realizing the full implications of the decision. The war ended on August 14, 2006 when the UN Security Council Resolution (no. 1701) entered into force. During the war, voices of protest were heard in Israel, mainly from reserve service soldiers, journalists, and distinguished writers. After the war, thousands of people have criticized the government decisions, demanded the establishment of a national inquiry committee to investigate the war events and, called for the resignation of the war architects: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Minister of Defence Amir Peretz, and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. This article criticizes the establishment of the committee and the results it reached, arguing that it was a "sold game": The person under investigation should never be allowed to nominate his judges. This is mockery of justice, and travesty of social responsibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted (...) numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans—experiments publicized by post–Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere. (shrink)

In the decades after the Civil War, Southerners wrote and published their own history textbooks for secondary schools. These “mint julep textbooks,” as the Southern all-white editions were called by the 1960s, reinforced a Lost Cause narrative of the war for Southern audiences while competing with Northern versions of events. In this study, we employ both historical narrative and content analysis of six textbooks’ portrayals of John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The textbooks that are compared– (...) three Southern and three Northern – were written from the 1870s through the 1910s. While subtle but important differences emerge between the Northern and Southern depiction of these three figures, an even more important trend developed when analyzing change over time. In this article we conclude that, as time progressed, Southern versions of events increasingly impacted Northern textbooks. By the 1930s, the mint julep version of these three figures became the national consensus, as reflected in the work of historian David Saville Muzzey. This consensus around events like the raid at Harpers Ferry, the assassination of Lincoln, and the massacre at Fort Pillow lasted for much of the 20th century. By the early 20th century, Northerners appeased Southern interests in the writing of history textbooks. (shrink)

Chinese traditional costume is one of the important carriers of Chinese culture. The process of the emergence and development of the culture of traditional Chinese costume also reflects the cultural background and evolution of ancient Chinese society. In the context of the strengthening of the Chinese economy, the inheritance and development of Chinese clothing culture is of great importance for modern society. The epochs of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties are a period of Chinese history marked by frequent (...) wars, ethnic integration and convergence of various ideas. Against this background, there was a weakening of the Confucian "ritual" style, followed by the spread of the teachings of Xuan Xue, Buddhism and Taoism, and a freer, down-to-earth, elegant clothing culture appeared. This article consists of the following three parts: Diversity of social background; Artistic forms of costume culture of the Wei-Jin eras; Modern trends in the development of clothing culture. Based, among other things, on such material as the scroll painting "The Fairy of the Lo River" by the artist Gu Kaizhi of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, this article analyzes the influence of the teachings of Xuan-xue, Buddhism and Taoism on the costume of the Wei and Jin dynasties, illustrates the direction of development of modern Chinese costume culture, and continued the path for the development of clothing culture with Chinese specifics. (shrink)

The International Criminal Court's intervention into the ongoing civil war in northern Uganda evoked a chorus of confident predictions as to its capacity to bring peace and justice to the war-torn region. However, this optimism is unwarranted.

The book analyses the two decades of the brutal civil war of northern Uganda. The author modified Lederach's peacebuilding framework to include peacemaking to bring out the argument that women and men make significant contributions to the peace processes and point out women's position as top leadership actors. The book uncovers the under-emphasised role of women in peacemaking and building. From grassroots to national level, women were found to have organised themselves and assumed roles as advocates, negotiators and mobilisers. (...) The actions by women became evident at the stalemated Juba peace talks when women presented the Peace Torch to the peace negotiating teams who on the occasion shook hands for the first time and peace was ushered inches Their initiatives and non-violent actions offer lessons to resolve civil conflicts in Africa. The book recommends that women should undergo relevant training in times of peace as this would make them more effective in times of need. (shrink)

This essay replies to critics of my earlier piece in Historical Materialism which looked at the origins of the American Civil War. The essay re-emphasises the importance of the shift to wage labour in the North, it re-asserts the need to incorporate slave resistance as a key factor in any causal account of the sectional conflict, and it argues that the ultimate northern victory in that conflict should be seen as constituting a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It engages specifically with the (...) criticisms and some of the alternative interpretations offered by Charles Post, Eric Foner and Neil Davidson. (shrink)

This is a fun, chatty little book that also manages to say, comprehensibly, much that is profound about technology. This trifecta is an embarrassment to those of us phlegmatic of mind and turgid of prose, but more about that presently. First, the book.For any kid who ever doodled his way through junior high school American history—and therefore for most of our countrymen—the “victory” of the Union ironclad Monitor over the CSS Virginia preserved the Union blockade, assured Northern victory in (...) the Civil War, and signaled both a technological revolution in naval warfare and the advent of American technological preeminence. As David Mindell shows, however, none of the above. Moreover, these historical myths resulted not from fond recollections of a remote, more heroic time and place but, rather, from the carefully orchestrated real‐time machinations of interested historical actors: designers and allied contractors and politicians , navy bureaucrats and officers, cabinet‐level officials, newspaper propagandists, and earnest intellectuals, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.The Monitor barely made it to her famous pas de deux with the Virginia in Hampton Roads, and while she achieved tactical stalemate, Virginia, by her continued existence, strategically checkmated the Monitor, the Union Navy, and the Army of the Potomac in the Peninsula Campaign. Even after the Virginia was scuttled by the retreating Confederates, Monitor continued to swelter in futility, anchored for most of the summer of 1862 up the James River, just short of Richmond. But by then she was a sacred icon: in the telling phrase of the major source for this book, the ship's paymaster, Lt. William Keeler, she was “an iron ship in a glass case,” too valuable to Union morale to risk in combat.The six months of idle futility did give Keeler and his compatriots more than ample time for surprisingly deep ruminations on the nature of war and technology: on what classic military virtues such as “heroism” or “courage” or “honor” could possibly mean for those invulnerable behind iron armor; on whether “casualty‐free war” would be morally acceptable either to the now “machine operators” of the Monitor or to her victims; on the irony of life in a ship that was really a submersible, dependent on sealed hatches, often inadequate and unreliable ventilation blowers, and bilge pumps for life support; on the disjuncture between the “public” Monitor and life on the James; presciently, on what death might be like in an iron coffin. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited the ship soon after the engagement in Hampton Roads, made perhaps the most chilling observations for those of us fed a steady diet of “smart bombs,” cruise missiles, UACVs , and the happy prospect of war by remote control: “human strife is to be transferred from the heart and personality of man into cunning contrivances of machinery, which by‐and‐by will fight our wars with only the clank and smash of iron, strewing the field with broken engines, but damaging nobody's little finger except by accident” . Not then; probably not yet.Mindell probes and explores these weighty issues with a grace and aplomb that virtually indict more ponderous efforts. Yet therein lies a sublime reflexive paradox: Could this argument, so clearly expressed, have been thought, much less understood, without the twenty‐five years of scholarship comprised by EPOR , SCOT , or actor network theory? Happily, none of the jargon of any of these schools intrudes in this story. But the narrative, so clearly written, and the side comments within the narrative, so cleverly phrased, evoke a whole analytical structure, laboriously, if often murkily, assembled by tedious writers and tendentious theorists. Like the Monitor herself in her glass box, the history told here reflects as much as it reveals. Elegant and understandable historical narrative and theoretically animated inquiry are not, it would seem, mutually exclusive antagonists, but the warp and weft of collective intellectual endeavor. If some see farther or more clearly than others, it may be because, sometimes, they stand on the shoulders of industrious moles. (shrink)

Nolan, Malachy J When Japanese forces invaded New Guinea during the Second World War, there was a large missionary presence in the territory that had been built up in the preceding fifty years. The territory was previously a German possession but had been administered as a trust territory of Australia under a League of Nations mandate after the First World War. Geographically, it consisted of the northern part of the eastern half of the New Guinea mainland; the large islands (...) of New Britain and New Ireland, which lay to the north-east; and the Bougainville portion of the Solomon Islands, further to the east. There were missionaries from both Protestant and Catholic Churches and, because of history, many of these were of German background. (shrink)

This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic1 to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand, Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers. It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable. However, harmony within each section could (...) be secured only at the cost of intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core. (shrink)

Rambam Medical Center, the only tertiary care center and largest hospital in northern Israel, was subjected to continuous rocket attacks in 2006. This extreme situation posed serious and unprecedented ethical dilemmas to the hospital management. An ambiguous situation arose that required routine patient care in a tertiary modern hospital together with implementation of emergency measures while under direct fire. The physicians responsible for hospital management at that time share some of the moral dilemmas faced, the policy they chose to (...) follow, and offer a retrospective critical reflection in this paper. The hospital’s first priority was defined as delivery of emergency surgical and medical services to the wounded from the battlefields and home front, while concomitantly providing the civilian population with all elective medical and surgical services. The need for acute medical service was even more apparent as the situation of conflict led to closure of many ambulatory clinics, while urgent or planned medical care such as open heart surgery and chemotherapy continued. The hospital management took actions to minimize risks to patients, staff, and visitors during the ongoing attacks. Wards were relocated to unused underground spaces and corridors. However due to the shortage of shielded spaces, not all wards and patients could be relocated to safer areas. Modern warfare will most likely continue to involve civilian populations and institutes, blurring the division between peaceful high-tech medicine and the rough battlefront. Hospitals in high war-risk areas must be prepared to function and deliver treatment while under fire or facing similar threats. (shrink)

Ancient testimonia on the Druids are few in number and sparse on details, and they have yielded a broad range of scholarly opinions on the Druids’ function among the Gauls. This article examines the suspiciously limited role played by the Druids in Julius Caesar's Gallic War (= BGall.). Considering the work of both classicists and archaeologists, it argues that, given Caesar's demonstrated propensity for tailoring his portrayals of northern Europeans to fit with his narrative objectives, he deliberately omitted the (...) Druids from nearly all of the Gallic War save for a brief ethnographic digression on the Gauls. This he did in order to downplay the sophistication of the Gauls, and the threat they posed to the Romans, since the Druids were likely a potent source of anti-Roman sentiment during Caesar's time in Gaul, just as they seem to have been in the Early Imperial period. (shrink)

This book contains contributions by leading scholars from the fields of history, international relations, law, and philosophy. It includes novel research findings on the crusades, detention and interrogation policies in Northern Ireland, the Chechnya conflict, and the impact of Western detention policies on Al-Qaeda's tactics and narratives.

This chapter places the exodus of Russian scholars in the context of the country's turbulent twentieth-century experience of ‘three revolutions, two world wars, civil strife, and several changes of political regime’. It presents an account of the plight of Russian academics in German occupied territories who were caught ‘in the dead space between two tyrannies’. For some the price of survival in the 1940s involved temporary collaboration with the Nazi invaders, which is illustrated in the morally ambiguous wartime experiences of (...) Nikolas Poppe, Professor of Oriental Studies in Leningrad University, a leading expert of the languages and literatures of northern inner Asia; and of Ivan Malinin, professor and head of the department of pathology in the Krasnodar Medical Institute. Both found a way of resisting the communist state through temporary ‘collaboration’, and thus, reaffirmed ‘the right of the individual to make choices’. The chapter concludes by noting the change in Soviet policy towards the emigration of scientists after perestroika and its double-edged effect: ‘On the one hand, emigration impoverishes home institutions, but, on the other, the free migration of scientists has become one of the most effective mechanisms for integrating the country into the global scientific community’. (shrink)

This chapter examines the slave trade in north-western Ghana during the final decades of the nineteenth century and, more specifically, the history and archaeology of the defensive site of Yalingbong occupied by the community of Kpan/Dolbizan during a time known as the ‘Babatunik Wars’, when the Zaberma leader, Babatu, and his band of raiders waged war upon the region. Here, the documents produced by the colonial officers in the final years of the nineteenth century, and the traditions preserved in the (...) village today, speak to the complexity of the social, political, and economic relationships that existed between networks of sedentary agricultural communities, the bands of slave raiders, and the French and German officers. (shrink)

This article investigates the textual strategies with which Maeve Murphy's Silent Grace addresses viewers in contemporary Northern Ireland. Borrowing Eric Santner's concept of `narrative fetishism', the analysis examines how the film's representation of the past obscures the historical realities experienced by female political prisoners in Armagh jail in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From this standpoint, its ethical relation to historical `truth' and responsibilities to its local audience are debated.

The vast visual coverage of the Boxer Uprising in northern China that ended with foreigners traipsing through the Forbidden City in Beijing reflects both the richly innovative image technology at the turn of the century and the international interest in events that involved many of the world’s most powerful nations. Historians and students who seek to understand the incident through the innovative technology of today can, for the first time, access primary source images in large numbers malleably displayed in (...) the digital environment. The sheer volume of images collected in one place offers powerful new insights into a history already broadly covered in analytical texts and first-person accounts. One qualitative difference from previous histories is the emergence of subjective points of view that can be conveyed in multidimensional models that juxtapose experiential recordings of the day. Harnessing the tension of contrasting viewpoints – who knew what when – enables today’s learners to see through the lenses of past participants whose understanding was limited by location, communications and, one must remember, by not knowing the outcome. Those who were besieged in the Foreign Legations did not know if they would survive; soldiers and rebels on the road to Beijing knew only the difficulties of the march; illustrations in newspaper reports overseas were coloured by politics and both national and international rivalries. Digital visual representations have the possibility of recreating the collision of experiences that allow users to move between personal records and public reporting from the time to gain a knowledge that is unmitigated by an author’s text-based presentation and conclusions. The result is as much a revolution in perception of historical events – perception-based learning – as it is in information about these events. (shrink)

Civil war and peace-building -- Curriculum for conflict transformation -- Conflict transformation and northern Uganda -- The search for truth -- Reconciliation -- Inclusive citizenship -- Cambodia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland -- Conclusion.

In this essay, I will use a minimalist standard of decision-making capacity (DMC) to ascertain two cases in the medical ethics literature: the 1978 case of Mary C. Northern and a more recent case involving a paranoid war veteran (call him Jack). In both cases the patients refuse medical treatment out of denial that they are genuinely ill. I believe these cases illustrate two matters: (1) the need of holding oneself to a minimal DMC standard so as to make (...) as salient as possible the patient's own reasons for sometimes unusual treatment denials; (2) the need for clinicians and other relevant parties to exercise great sensitivity toward engaging, on the patient's own terms, idiosyncratic treatment refusals through regard for what I will call the patient’s conditional preferences. These are particularly relevant matters when a patient’s DMC is questionable yet he/she registers what may well be his/her settled preferences. (shrink)

The long war between Israel and the Palestinians is not the root cause of all conflicts between Islam and the West, but it exacerbates every such conflict. From Northern Europe through North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and down to Australia, there are violent opponents of “the West” motivated, in part, by indignation at the..

A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In _The Other Renaissance_, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward decidedly (...) antihumanist sentiments. Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole. (shrink)

Heritage has burgeoned over the past quarter of a century from a small e;lite preoccupation into a major popular crusade. Everything from Disneyland to the Holocaust Museum, from the Balkan wars to the Northern Irish troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin Marbles bears the marks of the cult of heritage. In this acclaimed book David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession with the past and examines its power for both good and evil.

In the decades after 1944 the four nations of Britain shared a common educational programme. By 2015, this programme had fragmented: the patterns of schooling and higher education in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England resembled each other less and less. This new edition of the popular _Education in Britain_ traces and explains this process of divergence, as well as the arguments and conflicts that have accompanied it. With a reach that extends from the primary school to the university, (...) and from culture to politics and economics, Ken Jones explores the achievements and limits of post-war reform and the egalitarian aspirations of the 1960s and 1970s. He registers the impact of the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s, and of the New Labour governments which were its inheritors. Turning to the twenty-first century, Jones tracks the educational consequences of devolution and austerity. The result is a book which is more attentive than any other to the ever-increasing diversity of education in Britain. This comprehensive and accessible overview will have a wide appeal. It will also be an invaluable resource on courses in educational studies, teacher education and sociology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Scale of the Nation in a Shrinking WorldJoan Ramon Resina (bio)The 1990s saw the rise of political issues that, although by no means new, generated a great deal of discourse based on a semantic rupture with the past. The need to inscribe political analysis with a feeling of historical acceleration was nowhere as patent as in George W. Bush's New World Order. Although the "New World Order" quickly (...) gave way to the euphemism "globalization," it soon became obvious that political agendas would change considerably as would the terms of engagement with realities that had once seemed straightforward and now appeared riddled with theoretical problems.Nationalism was salient among those realities. Although it had driven decolonization in the fifties and sixties and throughout the Vietnam era, it seemed to flare up roughly at the time when Bush pronounced the bipolar order dead. As the political map was being redrawn after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, other foci of political struggle caught the world's attention. National struggles in other regions were interpreted as collateral of that breakdown rather than long-standing symptoms of similar tensions at different scales. Once more, the European continent was caught in the incongruity of its historical processes. While Western Europe was cautiously advancing toward economic and political integration, Eastern Europe found itself returning from a "posthistorical" experiment in supranationalism to the "historical" horizon of polities being reconfigured according to such social tangibles as a common language and religion, a traditional relation to place, and shared identifying memories.Until the 1990s the West smugly believed that it had consolidated state borders around seemingly homogeneous societies. Cultural integration was flaky in spots (Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica); those resistances, however, were looked on mostly as archaic irrelevances bound to disappear. But as nationalism began to haunt the cozy dream of a posthistorical balance of power, nonchalance gave way to a glut of intellectual exorcisms meant to conjure the evil that had caught at Europe's edges. In this new context, the Balkans represented for Europe, in Žižek's words, "the peculiar status of a ghost that haunts it." If the Balkans "are always somewhere else, a little bit more toward the southeast" [3], in the 1990s the danger of Balkanization seemed ubiquitous. At the time, a true Balkan hysteria rang out in the most self-satisfied European nations. In France and Spain, long-standing conflicts between center and periphery were recast in terms of the horror seen on CNN. Europe spatialized its fears, turning geographic distance into a metaphor for the racism directed against its internal others.Europe's internal others did not consist only of immigrants from non-EU countries, for whom liberals always had a soft spot, but also of those peoples and territorial units capable and culpable of tearing admirable nations apart. It was in those territorial units, which had been incorporated but not assimilated in the course of nation-state building, that nationalism was "raising its ugly head." It was here that "'reflexive' Politically Correct racism" (Žižek) applied the Balkans metaphor, projecting every conceivable horror into the intentions of unsuspecting citizens. As Žižek observed at the time, "[t]he [End Page 46] Balkans constitute a place of exception with regard to which the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act out his/her repressed racism" [6]. This perverse acting out was all the more acceptable, inasmuch as the peoples subjected to the logic of displaced racism were after all white and developed, and thus free game for the tolerant multiculturalist, who could always bring forward less-developed regions as potential victims of the centrifugal region's egotism. When the Balkans war broke out in May of 1991, the first Western European reactions were predominantly pro-Serbian. Never mind that Slovenia and Croatia were pro-Western and democratic. Western intelligentsias accused them of pettiness and lack of solidarity and began to restrain their large-state bias only when Serbian annexationists directed their all-out war against Bosnian Muslims, who, although white and no less developed than their attackers, were, by virtue of their religion, a patent instance of otherness. Overnight politically correct racism swung from tolerance for... (shrink)

‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of Books The title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of (...) essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance. Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind. Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004. (shrink)

Writing under the pseudonym "Jotabeche," José Joaquín Vallejo wrote forty-one short articles on Chilean life and society in the early republic. Known for their caustic wit, his writings were an instant success when they were first published in Chilean magazines and newspapers. This volume presents these vivid essays for the first time in English. Vallejo made famous the style of writing termed "costumbrista"—sketches and vignettes of society and local customs. He focused on the Norte Chico, or the mining zone of (...) Copiapó where he was born and where he lived most of his later life. His essays include vivid studies of mineworkers; the advancement of modernity in the steamships at Caldera; the religious, intensely cultural province of Copiapó; and the general atmosphere of liberalism beginning to pervade the country of Chile during that time. Considered the founder of his country's "genuinely national literature," he is the first creative writer of stature to emerge in Chile after the country's wars of independence. A provincial northerner, his writings give a sense of what these parts of Chile looked and felt like during the years of the early Chilean republic, and are consequently of ultimate value. (shrink)

Se exponen las prácticas docentes de las educadoras de párvulos, que cumplen una función reproductora del nacionalismo que es internalizado en las niñas y niños como la ciudadanía chilena. Para ello, configuran un escenario lúdico que ritualiza la conducta cívica y patriótica, por medio de conmemoraciones cívicas fundadas en el belicismo de la guerra del Pacífico, sin considerar la realidad cosmopolita y de diversidad cultural presente en las aulas nortinas. A partir de esto, proponemos una nueva perspectiva respecto de la (...) realización de actos cívicos en la educación parvularia, para hacerlos más inclusivos y acordes a la realidad cultural de la región de Tarapacá, la más multicultural de Chile. This paper describes the teaching practices of pre-school teachers who play a reproductive role of nationalism internalized in children as Chilean citizenships. This happens as the result of a ludic scenario that ritualizes civic and patriotic conduct, through civic commemorations based on the Pacific war, regardless both the cosmopolitan reality and cultural diversity present in classrooms in the Northern part of Chile. Considering this, we propose a new perspective on conducting civic events in early childhood education, to make them more inclusive and consistent with the cultural reality of the region of Tarapacá, Chile's most multicultural region. (shrink)

This paper examines the literary representation of the beginnings of the Northern Irish Troubles with regard to a gender variable, in the selected poems by Heaney, Durcan, Boland, Meehan and Morrissey. The reading of Heaney’s “Punishment” will attempt to focus not solely on the poem’s repeatedly criticized misogyny but on analyzing it in a broader, historical context of the North’s conflict. In Durcan’s case, his prominent nationalist descent or his declared contempt for any form of paramilitary terrorism do not (...) seem to prevent him entirely from immortalizing female victims of the Troubles. Boland’s attitude seems the most unequivocal: the clear aversion to the language of death and rendering Irish women’s experiences in this discourse. The article concludes with analysis of Meehan’s “Southern” guilt for the situation of Catholics in the North with the simultaneous critique of perpetrated violence and Morrissey’s complicated standpoint: atheist/neutral/Protestant/communist and her striving for the impossible impartiality in a war-ridden and politically divided country. Trying to avoid systemic victimization of Irish women, the paper intends to analyze the historical and political circumstances which made them more susceptible to various forms of attacks at the beginnings of the Troubles, as reflected in the titular labels. (shrink)

The origin of Rudolf Hagelstange’s cycle of sonnets "Venezianisches Credo" was Venice, while he was temporarily stationed in northern Italy in 1944 as a soldier. Twenty-four sonnets were written in the lagoon city, four more in Breganze, the remainder in Verona, where a limited edition was published in spring 1945, after some of the sonnets had already been distributed in military circles over some months. This contribution attempts on the one hand to analyze Hagelstange’s choice of the sonnet–form – (...) a classical type of lyric poetry, guaranteeing tradition and continuity –, claiming that at that time sonnets had become a fashionable form of oppositional poetry; on the other hand, the content of the three dozen sonnets will be analyzed, in which, over long stretches discordance prevails. For the author initially presents a damning indictment of the criminal activities of the NS-regime, until he eventually proclaims – with reference to Schiller – that the contemporary spiritual and moral crisis can yet be overcome by an ‚other Germany‘. In the final analysis, Hagelstange brilliantly succeeded – by means of an interaction of continuity and dissonance – to merge aesthetic and ethical aspects and thereby managed to create one of the most outstanding lyrical documents near the end of World War II. (shrink)

In a book that challenges the most widely held ideas of why individuals engage in collective conflict, Russell Hardin offers a timely, crucial explanation of group action in its most destructive forms. Contrary to those observers who attribute group violence to irrationality, primordial instinct, or complex psychology, Hardin uncovers a systematic exploitation of self-interest in the underpinnings of group identification and collective violence. Using examples from Mafia vendettas to ethnic violence in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda, he describes the (...) social and economic circumstances that set this violence into motion. Hardin explains why hatred alone does not necessarily start wars but how leaders cultivate it to mobilize their people. He also reveals the thinking behind the preemptive strikes that contribute to much of the violence between groups, identifies the dangers of "particularist" communitarianism, and argues for government structures to prevent any ethnic or other group from having too much sway. Exploring conflict between groups such as Serbs and Croats, Hutu and Tutsi, Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants, Hardin vividly illustrates the danger that arises when individual and group interests merge. In these examples, groups of people have been governed by movements that managed to reflect their members' personal interests--mainly by striving for political and economic advances at the expense of other groups and by closing themselves off from society at large. The author concludes that we make a better and safer world if we design our social institutions to facilitate individual efforts to achieve personal goals than if we concentrate on the ethnic political makeup of our respective societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Germany Left the Republic of LettersKasper Risbjerg EskildsenA common culture of scholarship existed across Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. This culture possessed its own institutions, traditions, and rituals that connected its members across borders and religious divides. A professor from Lisbon, a librarian from Hanover, and a schoolmaster from Turku would all speak nearly the same language and wear nearly the same clothing. They would (...) share many of the same dreams, celebrate many of the same heroes, and have similar memories from their youth and adult life. They were convinced that they belonged to the same cultural group and were normally willing to make personal and economic sacrifices when called upon by members of this group. Long before the emergence of European nation-states, the community of scholars formed what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined community, united by the forces of language, culture, and writing.1From around 1500, the community of scholars went by the name respublica litteraria—the Republic of Letters. Italian humanists already used the metaphor in the early fifteenth century, and with Erasmus of Rotterdam's Antibar-barorum liber, it became commonplace within Europe.2 To Erasmus and his [End Page 421] circle the Republic of Letters signified the natural community between all students of creation, divine reason, and Greek and Roman antiquity. It gathered scholars across space and time and set them apart from the hordes of ignorant barbarians. To most early modern scholars, however, respublica litteraria signified much more than a community of reason and knowledge. They used the metaphor to describe every aspect of the culture of scholarship that connected its members and demarcated them from surrounding society. Universities, academies, and secret societies were talked about as parts of the Republic of Letters. Scholarly letters and conversations tête-à-tête, books, lectures and seminars, rituals and traditions were all included. The metaphor demarcated invisible borders between learned and lay, tacitly known to insiders but rarely strictly defined.3The Republic ChallengedDuring the last decades of the seventeenth century the metaphor of the Republic of Letters lost much of its force and elasticity. Scholars used and debated the metaphor more than ever before, but these heated and emotional discussions were not necessarily—as is assumed in much of the work on the eighteenth century4 —a sign that the metaphor and the culture it represented had gained ground. The discussions were, much rather, a symptom of crisis. The end of the great religious wars and the emergence of modern centralized states forced scholars to rethink their role in society and their relationship to the new military and administrative elites. Philosophical skepticism and philological criticism threatened established academic teachings and methods.5 Debates about the Republic of Letters reveal the scholars' efforts to answer these political and intellectual challenges. In her studies of learned Huguenots who, after 1685, were spread across Europe, Anne Goldgar has described how the alienated community of scholars at the turn of the eighteenth century came increasingly under pressure.6 The Huguenots felt marginalized in their adopted [End Page 422] homes, lost income and patronage, and suffered a decline in social prestige. According to Goldgar, these external pressures resulted in stronger internal bonds, as exiled scholars rallied around the ideal of the borderless Republic of Letters. But already before Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot scholars defined a French version of the republic—La République des Lettres—in strong opposition to the forces suppressing the Protestant minority. In 1684 Pierre Bayle defiantly declared from his Dutch refuge,It is not a matter of religion, but of science: therefore one should put an end to all boundaries that divide men into different camps, and consider only that which unites them, namely their rank as noblemen in the Republic of Letters. In this sense all scholars should regard themselves as brothers, and consequently one another as family. They should say:We are all equal We are all relatives } as children of Apollo.7Protestant Northern Europe did not witness the same religious and political conflicts that France did.8 Scholars there were also ridden by crisis at the turn... (shrink)

This paper would like to discuss some aspects of current trends in studies on eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. In the first part it addresses recent approaches devoted to the reconstruction of the conceptualization of Eastern Europe at the time of the Enlightenment, which have often been inspired by the work of Edward Said and Martin Bernal. These include Larry Woolf's Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). Michael Confino has provided a detailed critique of Woolf's approach. It can be argued that Woolf is in (...) fact projecting Cold War divisions back into the eighteenth century. The article argues in favour of a less “Orientalising” approach to the history of Eastern Europe, by proving an alternative overview of the historical dimensions of the eastern (and northern) regions of Europe in the eighteenth century. Eastern Europe was inextricably connected to its western European neighbours. Without Eastern Europe, European history is incomplete and incomprehensible. In the third part the article argues that the interpretative framework of the “first crisis of the Old Regime”, which Franco Venturi outlined in his Settecento riformatore in the 19870s and 1980s represented a subtle rejection of the East/west dichotomy, and in fact foreshadowed the eventual reunification of Europe after the end of the Cold War. (shrink)

This book focuses on the political thought of American statesmen. These statesmen have had consistent and comprehensive views of the good of the country and their actions have been informed by those views. The editors argue that political life in America has been punctuated by three great crises in its history-the crisis of the Founding, the crisis of the House Divided, and the crisis of the Great Depression. The Second World War was a crisis not just for America but for (...) the whole of Western Civiliation and, in the wake of that war, a new crisis arose which came to be called the "Cold War." Just when that gave the appearance of being resolved, the world reached a new juncture, a new crisis, which Samuel P. Huntington dubbed the "clash of civiliations." The statesmen having political responsibility in confronting the first three crises in America's history came as close to philosophic grasp of the problems of liberal democracy as one could demand from those embroiled in the active resolution of events. Their reflection of political philosophy in the full sense informed their actions. Since we cannot confidently explain the future, Aristotle warned us to call no man happy while he still lives. Thus the book, in its third edition, keeps to its settled pattern of dealing with settled matters. The preface to the third edition confronts the three later crises and, to the extent consistent with truth, attempts to relate them to the first three. Morton J. Frisch was professor emeritus of political science at Northern Illinois University. He was the author or editor of several books, including Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton; Alexander Hamilton and the Political Order; and Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Contribution of the New Deal to American Political Thought and Practice. Richard G. Stevens retired from National Defense University as professor of political science in 1994. Since then he has taught as an adjunct professor of government at American University. He is co-editor with Matthew J. Franck of Sober as a Judge: The Supreme Court and Republican Liberty, and the author of The American Constitution and Its Provenance; Reason and History in Judicial Judgment: Felix Frankfurter and Due Process; and Political Philosophy: An Introduction. (shrink)

This is the sixth volume in the Oxford Classical Texts series of Livy and contains a Latin text, together with full apparatus criticus and Latin introduction, of Books 36-40, which cover the period from 192 to 179 BC. This momentous era in the history of Republican Rome begins with the war with Antiochus, which resulted in Rome's indirect control of Greece and Asia, and concludes with the death of Philip V of Macedon, foreshadowing the Third Macedonian War. During these years (...) Rome also struggled for the increasing dominance of northern Italy and Spain. On the domestic front, Livy depicts this period as the beginning of Roman moral decline, as reflected in such events as the trials of the Scipios, the censorship of Cato, and the Bacchanalia. Since much of the account by Polybius is fragmentary, Livy's narrative is the main source for the history of the period. (shrink)

I AM glad that Dr. Fotheringham in the interesting paper which appeared in the Classical Quarterly adhered to the view that ‘Caesar calculated the new moon for January 1 [45 B.C]…and that this calculation determined the inaugural day of the Julian calendar.’ As the object of my brief note, on which he commented, was merely to show that Groebe had failed to prove that the day in question was January 2, I have only a few questions to ask. But first, (...) in justice to Judeich, I ought to say that his calculations, which Dr. Fotheringham notices, were made with the help of the assistant-astronomer attached to the observatory of the University of Strassburg. While Dr. Fotheringham admits that I was right in maintaining that the new moon of January 2, 45 B.C. was not visible on the evening of that day, he holds that Groebe was ‘fairly entitled to say’ that the new moon of March 24, 58 B.C. , was visible on March 25. Dr. Fotheringham may be justified in saying that it ought ‘in normal [or abnormally fine ?] weather to have been visible that evening’; but, as I observed in my note, Groebe affirmed that in calculating the time of visibility of the crescent we should accept the mean of the Babylonian estimates, 36 hours—less, I should have added, in the early spring and the winter, more in the summer and autumn. Was he entitled to deduct 9 hours from the mean for an observation made not in the clear atmosphere of the East, but in Switzerland? Dr. Fotheringham tells us that ‘the shortest interval between a new moon and the observation of the moon by Schmidt's naked eye comes’ not, as Groebe said, to 29, but ‘to 25.7 hours.’ But forty-eight of Schmidt's forty-nine observations were made at Athens, where the atmosphere is clearer than in Switzerland. The great difference in visibility which a clear atmosphere makes must strike everyone who goes from this country or from Switzerland to the East or to Northern Africa. I realized it for the first time when I was exploring in Tunisia before the war. Has Dr. Fotheringham or any other trustworthy observer ever seen with the naked eye in an atmosphere no clearer than that of Geneva a moon not more than 27 hours old? If so, is it not remarkable that, as Dr. Fotheringham has said, ‘Hitherto it has been the practice to assume that [in the early spring or the winter and in favourable weather ?] the moon becomes visible on the first evening when she is more than 30 hours old at sunset’? (shrink)

The Twelve Member States agreed in December 1991 in Maastricht on an EconomicMonetary Union, including a single currency and an autonomous European central bank by the turn of the century, and on "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe". The structure of the European Political Union resembles a temple with three pillars : more powers for the European Parliament on a wider ranger of policy issues, a separate framework for a common foreign and security policy, and intergovernmental cooperation (...) on justice and internal aff airs. The new Treaty wilt replace the Treaty of Rome only after ratification in all twelve member states. White EMU and EPU dominated the public agenda, the internal market programme was drawing to a close with nearly all White paper measures adopted. Emphasis shifted to implementation problems. The prolonged conflict between Commission, Parliament and Council on the 1992 budget gave a taste of increasing tensions on budgetary issues, especially between "northern" and "southern" interests. That divide wilt deepen with or without ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. The budgetary battle of 1991 was partly on external relations. The external activities of the EC were all but successful in 1991: disparate conduct in the Gulf War, failure to contain conflict in Yugoslavia, near-collapse of negotiations with the EFTA countries, deadlock in Gatt-talks and the threat of a trade war between the three trade blocks. Ibe European Common Agricultural Policy remained a major stumblingblock in the Gatt-talks. The Commission proposed a radical reform package for CAP, fiercely opposed by France until the end of the year. (shrink)