Offering a radical interpretation of a major political issue, Chris Gifford moves beyond existing narrative and institutional accounts of Britain and Europe to present a theoretically coherent and ...unique perspective on this troubled relationship. He acknowledges that populist Euroscepticism has become fundamental to constituting Britain and 'Britishness' in a post-imperial context, despite membership of the European Union. Organized chronologically, this interesting study provides lucid overviews of key periods in the British-European Union relationship. It combines political economy with political identity to illustrate how forms of Euroscepticism have become embedded across the British political class and culture. The book focuses not on outlining history or the impact of British integration on British institutions, but on the ways in which elite behaviour towards European integration should be analyzed as practices and discourses that use Euroesceptism to construct Britain and distinctive British political projects.
In Inglorious, Illegal
Bastards , Aaron Herald Skabelund examines
how the Self-Defense Force (SDF)-the post-World War II Japanese
military-and specifically the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF),
...struggled for legitimacy in a society at best indifferent to them
and often hostile to their very existence.
From the early iterations of the GSDF as the Police Reserve
Force and the National Safety Force, through its establishment as
the largest and most visible branch of the armed forces, the GSDF
deployed an array of public outreach and public service
initiatives, including off-base and on-base events, civil
engineering projects, and natural disaster relief operations.
Internally, the GSDF focused on indoctrination of its personnel to
fashion a reconfigured patriotism and esprit de corps. These
efforts to gain legitimacy achieved some success and influenced the
public over time, but they did not just change society. They also
transformed the force itself, as it assumed new priorities and
traditions and contributed to the making of a Cold War defense
identity, which came to be shared by wider society in Japan. As
Inglorious, Illegal Bastards demonstrates, this identity
endures today, several decades after the end of the Cold War.
Equality of opportunity is about leveling the playing field so that circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, place of birth, or family background do not influence a persons life chances. Success in ...life should depend on peoples choices, effort and talents, not to their circumstances at birth. Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean introduces new methods for measuring inequality of opportunities and makes an assessment of its evolution in Latin America over a decade.An innovative Human Opportunity Index and other parametric and non-parametric techniques are presented for quantifying inequality based on circumstances exogenous to individual efforts. These methods are applied to gauge inequality of opportunities in access to basic services for children, learning achievement for youth, and income and consumption for adults.
The essays in this book trace the development of the author's thinking about international institutions between 1980 and 1988. The introduction, written especially for this volume, summarizes and ...defends the "neoliberal institutionalism" that he advocates as a framework for understanding world politics.
Focusing on regional geopolitics, social dynamics, watershed political rituals, and family narratives, this book explores the cultural process of moving from enmity to engagement amidst the complex ...legacies of civil war and the global Cold War following the Inter-Korean Summit of June 2000.
When the interstate highway program connected America's cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a ...much heralded "freeway revolt," saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans's French Quarter. This book tells of theotherrevolt, a movement of creative opposition, commemoration, and preservation staged on behalf of the mostly minority urban neighborhoods that lacked the political and economic power to resist the onslaught of highway construction.
Within the context of the larger historical forces of the 1960s and 1970s, Eric Avila maps the creative strategies devised by urban communities to document and protest the damage that highways wrought. The works of Chicanas and other women of color-from the commemorative poetry of Patricia Preciado Martin and Lorna Dee Cervantes to the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes to the underpass murals of Judy Baca-expose highway construction as not only a racist but also a sexist enterprise. In colorful paintings, East Los Angeles artists such as David Botello, Carlos Almaraz, and Frank Romero satirize, criticize, and aestheticize the structure of the freeway. Local artists paint murals on the concrete piers of a highway interchange in San Diego's Chicano Park. The Rondo Days Festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Black Archives, History, and Research Foundation in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami preserve and celebrate the memories of historic African American communities lost to the freeway.
Bringing such efforts to the fore in the story of the freeway revolt,The Folklore of the Freewaymoves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization. Losers, perhaps, in their fight against the freeway, the diverse communities at the center of the book nonetheless generate powerful cultural forces that shape our understanding of the urban landscape and influence the shifting priorities of contemporary urban policy.
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution of any advanced industrialized nation. While other developed countries face similar challenges from ...globalization and technological change, none rivals America’s singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population. Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation’s history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women’s advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells. America’s unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society.
Focusing on the major movements and personalities of the time, as well as the lasting influence of the period,Canada's 1960sexamines the legacy of this rebellious decade's impact on contemporary ...notions of Canadian identity.
Beyond the divide Mikkonen, Simo; Koivunen, Pia
2015., 2015, 2015-10-15
eBook
Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there ...were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations, and individuals who brought people from the East and the West together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and others.
Over the past 15 years, the project of advanced European integration has followed a complex secular and cosmopolitan agenda. As that agenda has evolved, however, so have various hard-line populist ...movements with goals diametrically opposed to the ideals of a harmonious European Union. Spearheaded by figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the controversial leader of France's National Front party, these radical movements have become increasingly influential and, because of their philosophical affinities with fascism and national socialism--politically worrisome.
InIntegral Europe,anthropologist Douglas Holmes posits that such movements are philosophically rooted in integralism, a sensibility that, in its most benign form, enables people to maintain their ethnic identity and solidarity within the context of an increasingly pluralistic society. Taken to irrational extremes by people like Le Pen, integralism is being used to inflame people's feelings of alienation and powerlessness, the by-products of impersonal, transnational "fast-capitalism." The consequences are an invidious politics of exclusion that spawns cultural nationalism, racism, and social disorder.
The analysis moves from northern Italy to Strasbourg and Brussels, the two venues of the European Parliament, and finally to the East End of London. This multi-sited ethnography provides critical perspective on integralism as a form of intimate cultural practice and a violent idiom of estrangement. It combines a wide-ranging review of modern and historical scholarship with two years of field research that included personal interviews with right-wing activists, among them Le Pen and neo-Nazis in inner London. Fascinating, provocative, and sobering,Integral Europeoffers a rare inside look at one of modern Europe's most unsettling political trends.
