Mother Country Research Articles

The United Kingdom and Imperial federation, 1900 to 1939: a precedent for British legal relations with the European Union?

Imperial federation was a movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to turn the British Empire into a global federal state. It focused on the self-governing parts of the Empire that included the United Kingdom and the Dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Newfoundland. The unofficial motto of the Imperial federalists was ‘federate or disintegrate’. Many argue that the European Union of today is facing a similar choice. This article will examine Imperial federalist proposals for constitutional reform in the legislative, executive and judicial spheres. It might be expected that the main centres of opposition to Imperial federalism lay at the peripheries of the Empire in Dominions such as South Africa and Canada. This article argues that successive governments of the United Kingdom, the mother country of the Empire, proved to be the most consistent and determined opponents of Imperial federalist initiatives. This article will examine why the government of the United Kingdom acted as the leading opponent of most federal proposals involving constitutional reform. This analysis will also assess the importance of law and popular perceptions of legal tradition in attacking federal schemes throughout the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Glimpses of British Guiana at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886

This paper uses the example of the British Guiana Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 as a case study to demonstrate how British Guiana (now Guyana) was represented in Britain at the time, by crossreferencing different materials (e.g. objects, correspondence, reports, and newspapers from that period). This exhibition also shows which raw materials from the British Guiana were of interest to Britain and the involvement of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in this matter. Nevertheless, the exhibition not only displayed objects and commodities, such as the case of sugar, but also displayed people. Here, particular attention is paid to the Amerindians who were portrayed as living ethnological exhibits at the exhibition. This paper aims to understand how British Guiana was seen and administered by its mother country and also how Everard im Thurn (1852-1932), the explorer, sought to manoeuvre that representation, as well as his relation with RBG, Kew. Taking into consideration that this colony was a neglected area of the British Empire, even in im Thurn’s time, this exhibition was an opportunity not only to display the empire but also for advertising the potential of the neglected colony and to ensure that it would not be forgotten.

The Influence of Infant Feeding Practices on Infant Mortality in Southern Africa.

Objective To examine the adjusted and unadjusted effects of infant feeding practices on infant mortality in Southern Africa. Methods A merged dataset from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys for Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe was analysed using the Cox Proportional Hazard Model. A total number of 13,218 infants born in 5years preceding all the surveys with information on infant feeding practices constituted the study population. Infant mortality was the outcome variable and infant feeding practices categorised into; no breastfeeding, partial breastfeeding and exclusive breastfeeding were the main explanatory variables. Maternal demographic and socio-economic characteristics and infants' bio-demographic characteristics were also studied. Results Although, exclusive breastfeeding was quite low (12%), exclusively breastfed infants exhibited a 97% lower risk of dying during infancy compared to infants not breastfed in the region. Variations existed by country in the levels and patterns of both infant mortality and infant feeding practices. Mother's country, highest level of education and marital status; child's sex, birth weight and preceding birth interval were the significant predictors of infant mortality in Southern Africa. Conclusions Any form of breastfeeding whether exclusive or partial breastfeeding greatly reduces the risk of infant mortality with the greatest mortality reduction effect observed among exclusively breastfed infants in Southern Africa. To reduce the upsurge of infant mortality, there is the need to step up the effectiveness of child nutrition programmes that promote breastfeeding and put emphasis on exclusive breastfeeding of infants in the region.

A Preliminary Analysis of British New England With Her Mother Country Debates About the Currency Issue

A Preliminary Analysis of British New England With Her Mother Country Debates About the Currency Issue

Pathways of equality through education: impact of gender (in)equality and maternal education on exclusive breastfeeding among natives and migrants in Belgium.

Even though breastfeeding is typically considered the preferred feeding method for infants worldwide, in Belgium, breastfeeding rates remain low across native and migrant groups while the underlying determinants are unclear. Furthermore, research examining contextual effects, especially regarding gender (in)equality and ideology, has not been conducted. We hypothesized that greater gender equality scores in the country of origin will result in higher breastfeeding chances. Because gender equality does not operate only at the contextual level but can be mediated through individual level resources, we hypothesized the following for maternal education: higher maternal education will be an important positive predictor for exclusive breastfeeding chances in Belgium, but its effects will differ over subsequent origin countries. Based on IKAROS data (GeÏntegreerd Kind Activiteiten en Regio Ondersteunings Systeem), we perform multilevel analyses on 27 936 newborns. Feeding method is indicated by exclusive breastfeeding 3 months after childbirth. We measure gender (in)equality using Global Gender Gap scores from the mother's origin country. Maternal education is a metric variable based on International Standard Classification of Education indicators. Results show that 3.6% of the variation in breastfeeding can be explained by differences between the migrant mother's country of origin. However, the effect of gender (in)equality appears to be non-significant. After adding maternal education, the effect for origin countries scoring low on gender equality turns significant. Maternal education on its own shows strong positive association with exclusive breastfeeding and, furthermore, has different effects for different origin countries. Possible explanations are discussed in-depth setting direction for further research regarding the different pathways gender (in)equality and maternal education affect breastfeeding. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Parents’ reasons for community language schools: insight from a high-shift, non-visible, middle-class community

ABSTRACTIn the past decade, there has been increased scholarly interest in the purpose and functions of community language schools, also known as heritage, supplementary or complementary schools. In particular, previous studies have focused on schools operating in minority communities deriving from Asian and Eastern-European countries, showing that notions of identity and belonging to a ‘mother country’ are key purposes of these schools. However, community language schools in Australia operate in minority communities with diverse cultural, historical, social and migration histories and findings from other studies may not be generalisable to other community language schools. To broaden our understanding of the aims and purpose of these schools and to allow for meaningful comparisons, this study focuses on parents reasons for enrolling their children at a Swedish community language school in Australia, often described as a ‘high-shift’, ‘non-visible’ minority community. Seven parents were interviewed. Findings show that reasons for perpetuating Swedish language derived from notions of identity and belonging, but that parents also aimed for their children to invest in Swedish language as cultural capital valuable in Sweden, Australia and elsewhere.

Conservatives and conditional loyalty: The Rebellion Losses Crisis of 1849 in Montreal (Les conservateurs et la loyauté conditionnelle: la crise de la Loi d’indemnisation pour le Bas-Canada de 1849 à Montréal)

In 1849, the conservatives of Montreal engaged in a series of ostensibly disloyal actions: the burning of the Parliament, attacks on the Governor General, and the publication of the Annexation Manifesto. Yet even as they did so they refused to abandon the language of loyalty. Canadian conservatives instead chose to follow the political philosophy of John Locke, endorsing his ‘right of revolution’. In so doing, they demonstrated an ideology eerily similar to that of the American Patriots three quarters of a century earlier. They held a conditional conception of loyalty as a social contract between monarch and subject. The British Crown was seen to have broken this contract through its sanctioning of the Rebellion Losses Bill and its implicit support of ‘French Domination’. The connection between mother country and colony was now conceived as open to negotiation.

The impact of the English common law on Caribbean society

In the 17th and 18th centuries as Britain expanded her influence throughout the world she took to her colonies all of her institutions – social, financial, religious and legal, inter alia, and established them along identical lines with those in the mother country. With regard to the legal system, the Common Law of England became the Common Law of the particular colony, and the structure of the court system in large measure mirrored that of England with no regard to relevance or suitability to local conditions. The author examines the impact of the English Common Law in this way, looking in particular at the situation in the Caribbean islands and the mainland territory of Guyana.

Estimates of PI*S and PI*Z Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency alleles prevalence in the Caribbean and North, Central and South America

AAT deficiency is not a rare disease, but one of the most common congenital disorders increasing susceptibility of individuals with this deficiency to both lung and liver disease as well as other several adverse health effects. Studies to develop accurate estimates of the magnitude of this genetic disorder in any given country is critical for the development of screening programs for detection, diagnosis, and treatment of those individuals and/or families at risk. In the present study, estimates of the prevalence of the two major deficiency alleles PI S and PI Z were estimated for 25 countries in the Caribbean and North, Central, and South America to supplement our previous studies on 69 countries worldwide. Using data on the prevalence of the two most common deficiency alleles PI S and PIZ in the mother countries that provided the majority of immigrants to these 25 countries, as well as genetic epidemiological studies on various genetic subgroups indigenous to the Caribbean and North, Central and South America it was possible to develop new formulas to estimate the numbers in each of five phenotypic classes, namely PI MS, PI MZ, PI SS, PI SZ and PI ZZ for each country. When these 25 countries were grouped into six different geographic regions, the present study demonstrated striking differences when comparisons were made in numeric tables, maps and figures. Highly significant numbers of individuals at risk for AAT Deficiency were found in both the European, Mestizo and Mulatto populations for most of the 25 countries studied in the Caribbean and North, Central and South America. Our studies demonstrated striking differences in the prevalence of both the PIS and PIZ alleles among these 25 countries in the Caribbean and North, Central and South America and significant numbers of individuals at risk for adverse health effects associated with AAT Deficiency in a given country. When these data are added to the results from our earlier studies on 69 countries, we now have data on AAT Deficiency in 94 of the 193 countries worldwide listed in the CIA FactBook.

Postcolonial endgame

This position paper assesses the present-day situation of black and Asian writers against that of earlier generations; the generation of post-war migrants and a second generation born or raised in Britain wrote under the pressures of postcolonial independence struggles and charged race relations in the former mother country. Whereas the writers of these generations could – out of necessity – develop alliances and a clearer sense of their own position as “black” or “Asian” writers in British society, the situation for non-white writers is more complex today in light of new identity choices, new kinds of migration and a fast-changing world. The article asks whether race still trumps ethnicity in the marketplace of ideas; how citizenship interacts with nationality and nationalism; and, if so, in what ways it affects the work of writers.

A New Zealand sculptor’s diary: W. T. Trethewey in Europe, 1936

A sculptor's diary is a relatively rare thing in art history. That compiled by the New Zealander William Thomas Trethewey (1892-1956) (fig. 1) is a unique document, chronicling his voyage to and sojourn in Great Britain, as well as visits to Germany, France and Australia, between 16 January and 22 September 1936.1 The diary runs to a remarkable 952 pages - some 110,000 words - and meticulously yet exuberantly covers every stage of his 'Great OE' ('Overseas Experience' in New Zealand parlance), from his departure from Lyttelton, New Zealand on his outward voyage to his departure from Sydney, bound for Auckland, on his return voyage.As a diarist, Trethewey is no David d'Angers and still less a Keith Vaughan. Yet he is no Pooter either: there is minimal pretension or self-importance about him. A colonial classlessness is already evident in this second-generation New Zealander. What also indubitably emerges is what today would be called a 'people person'. As much at home in a saloon bar as an interested visitor to the Royal College of Art, Trethewey is sociable, curious, quick-witted, observant and good-humoured, a listener as well as a talker. He is no intellectual: his prose provides few insights into the workings of his mind or even into the creation of sculpture. Yet he is always engaging at whatever he addresses, and is vividly, even infectiously enthusiastic in his descriptiveness. Rather like his actual sculpture, Trethewey may not be profound but he nails it.Trethewey himself is every inch the 'colonial Cornish man' of his self-description and era.2 Never does he use the phrase 'Mother Country' to describe Britain. Instead, he remains constantly and proudly a New Zealander; and it is New Zealand that is certainly his 'Home'. Yet Trethewey's love affair with his destination at times vies with that of his near-contemporary Alan Mulgan, author of the infatuatedly Anglophile Home: A Colonial's Adventure (1927), which describes afternoon tea in a Great Western Railway restaurant car as 'almost a piece of poetry'.3 Trethewey is in turn near delirious when he beholds the picturesque Devonshire village of Clovelly: 'of all the marvellous places I have seen, Clovelly is it. Marvellous. Really I say this about everything I see but everything in England to an appreciative colonial IS MARVELLOUS.'4In strictly art-historical terms, Trethewey's diary reveals relatively few 'marvellous' insights, indeed, fewer than one might expect given his position by 1940 as 'the only really successful New Zealand sculptor'.5 The explanation lies surely in his self-made status and his practical bent, as well as his cultural milieu. The son of a Cornish carpenter, Jabez Trethewey (1851-1935), who had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1870s, William had initially trained as a woodcarver and earned his later livelihood as a monumental mason. By the 1930s he enjoyed a measure of success and even prosperity, which enabled him to go on what amounted to this sabbatical.6 He had only been noted for his sculpture over the previous 10-15 years, and its status was still widely regarded in the New Zealand public mind as a secondary 'craft' rather than being comparable to painting as an 'art'.7 For a craftsman-cum-businessman like Trethewey, this was probably less of an issue than it was for his traditionally more highly regarded and high-minded counterparts, notably Margaret Butler, R. N. Field, Richard Gross and Francis Shurrock.8 Surely alone of these sculptors, Trethewey found the experience of a visit to a linoleum factory in Kirkcaldy or a steel mill in Middlesbrough as riveting as one to an artist's studio, and worthier of lengthy description.It would be anachronistic and perhaps even intellectually snobbish to expect Trethewey to have foregrounded any fraternizing with his sculptural peers or indeed to have critiqued their works. Furthermore, he wrote the diary as much for his mother, wife and three eldest children in Christchurch as he did for himself, posting them excerpts of it at various stages. …

Reannealing of the Heart Ties: The Rhetoric of Anglo-American Kinship and the Politics of Reconciliation in the Prince of Wales’s 1860 Tour

On the evening of September 20, I860, a crowd estimated at thirty thousand gathered in the Detroit quays. Illuminated by the light of hundreds of colored lanterns affixed to riggings of the docked vessels, the individual faces of those who waited showed a mixture of excitement, anticipation, and fatigue, as many of them had been there for hours. (1) As the election campaign that would decide the next president of the United States was in its final, feverish weeks, mass meetings were far from unusual, but the crowd had come to engage in a decidedly unrepublican activity-welcoming the heir to the British throne. The royal visitor was none other than Albert Edward, eldest son of Queen Victoria and the great-grandson of George III, who was commencing his travels in the United States after a state visit to British North America. Any hope the young prince and his advisors had of relaxation following the frenetic pace of the Canadian tour was abruptly dashed upon his arrival in the City of the Straits. Upon landing, his steamer was besieged by curious onlookers who surged forward with such single-minded purpose that one member of the prince's retinue was shoved overboard and nearly drowned by the paddlewheel. (2) The prince was finally extricated and bundled into a waiting carriage to be conveyed to the relative safety of his hotel, but the reception he received in Detroit largely set the tone for the remainder of his visit. During his thirty days in the United States, the Prince of Wales and his suite traveled nearly twenty-six hundred miles from the sparsely settled prairies and booming commercial cities of the West to the nation's capital and then briefly to Virginia before continuing to some of the principal cities of the eastern seaboard. Nearly everywhere the prince visited, from St. Louis, Missouri, to Portland, Maine, he was enthusiastically welcomed with balls, addresses, parades, and spontaneous demonstrations of affection. Until the moment of his departure, crowds of curious spectators were his constant companions. (3) When his train stopped in rural Illinois, onlookers jumped up to peer into the carriage windows and offered their dirty hands for shaking. (4) Not even the sanctity of his lodgings was respected, as chambermaids sold strips of his bedclothes and water from his washbasin. (5) While the prince and his companions generally bore these incessant intrusions with good humor, the London Times wryly observed that the young royal was being mobbed by democratic hospitalities. (6) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The enormous popularity Albert Edward enjoyed during his brief visit to the United States raises several questions but none more compelling than the seeming contradiction of a nation steeped in republican tradition and intensely Anglophobic political rhetoric welcoming to its shores the great-grandson of the monarch from whom its founders had fought to obtain their liberty. At first glance, that all of this occurred against a backdrop of sectional division only heightens the inherent contradictions. As closer examination reveals, however, these fears of disunion shaped both the visit and the language Americans deployed to convey its significance. More than any other interpretive framework, Anglo-American kinship, both literal and figurative, defined the visit. Familial metaphors had long been used to describe relations between the mother country and her former colonies, but in the context of the royal visit they gained a higher emotional valence, expressing the matrix of reciprocal rights and responsibilities that continued to connect the two nations even after political separation and inspiring dreams of a common destiny. (7) By embracing Albert Edward as a kinsman, the visit's organizers reoriented the relationship between the United States and Great Britain around intimacy and affection rather than power. The language of family they popularized in the context of the royal visit lent added poignancy to the rites of remembrance and reconciliation in which the prince participated, laying a firm foundation for new avenues of Anglo-American friendship. …

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity by Sonia Ryang

Sonia Ryang, Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. 160 pp.Sonia Ryang begins her book, Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity, by asking the question, Can food be both and global? (1). As this question indicates, her book elaborates the ways in which certain Korean national foods have become internationally consumed food items on restaurant menus beyond national-South Korean as well as North Korean - boundaries. The issue of the authenticity of national food, therefore, is a central theoretical touchstone of the book. Ryang's anthropological recipe is uniquely formatted with each chapter devoted to describing how a particular Korean dish is consumed. Her selections include the following dishes: naengmyeon, chilled noodle soup (24); jeon, Korean-style pancakes (42); galbi, barbequed beef/short ribs (64); and bibimbap, a rice bowl mixed with vegetables and/or meat (89). While Ryang traces how each dish is sold and consumed in different locations in the United States-Los Angeles, Baltimore, Hawai'i (Kona and Honolulu), and Iowa City-as authentic Korean food, the historical trajectories of these dishes reveal the interplay of the colonial as well as global capitalist forces and power hierarchies within which these cuisines and the people who produce and consume them are entangled.In so doing, Ryang, influenced by Sidney Mintz's (1985) pioneering work on food and colonial/global capitalism, includes in her discussion the preceding Korean experiences with colonization, such as territorial annexations, forced labor migrations, and political exclusion/social marginalization, thereby substantiating her histories of the foods and broadening the purview of her analysis. In addition, she does not limit this historically rich ethnographic study within the boundaries of the US, but expands her anthropological aperture to related countries, such as Japan and South and North Korea. An intriguing aspect of this multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) is that she traces her own personal trajectory in experiencing these food items-following my stomach as she puts it (18)-in Japan as a descendant of the first wave of KoreanJapanese immigration; in Pyongyang and Seoul as an overseas Korean tourist who visits her mother countries; and in Hawai'i and other cities in the US as an Asian American college professor. Additionally, her personal relationships with this cuisine are overlapped, juxtaposed, and/ or contrasted with the personal trajectories of others from various race, class, and gender backgrounds, as Ryang glosses their familiarity, or lack thereof, with specific foods, such as Southeast Asian refugee immigrants in Des Moines, middle-class Chinese international students in Iowa City, native Hawaiian residents and Japanese tourists in Hawai'i, or low-income African Americans and Korean American homeless people in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, as her book articulates, personal preferences and/or obligations regarding food consumption may serve as ethnographic moments through which unequal power relations and the dynamics of a hierarchical global economic order are manifest.Ryang successfully corroborates her ethnographic genealogies of contemporary food (re)production and consumption mired in specific colonial and global capitalist legacies by interrogating the latter's spatio-temporal parameters. She explains, [...] we can grasp cuisine as something that evolves and changes through time and space: time, because it lives in history while itself participating in the making of history; and space, because it travels transnationally, just as people do (112). To provide a more cuisine-specific review, Chapter 1 introduces naengmyeon noodles she ate in Los Angeles in 1995 and 2011, in Pyongyang in 1985 and in Seoul in 2011. This delicate dish, originating in the northern parts of the Korean peninsula, is one of the primary food items which the North Korean government seeks to franchise out internationally, especially in China, as an authentic North Korean food (28); and yet, as Ryang describes, ordinary North Korean families cannot enjoy it due to the fact that it requires freezing the noodle soup before serving, and North Korean families often cannot afford the technological facilities of refrigeration (30-31). …

Fabrication of Industrial Safety Helmet from E-Waste

This work presents composite material of industrial safety helmet. The world is struggling many different ecological disasters, but one of the minimum discussed is the issue of electronic waste. The Electronics waste is an E-waste, which is the fastest growing, and a large amount of toxic, component of municipal garbage. The problem of E- waste is increasing at an unsustainable rate. The few literature reports that recycling of E-waste faces a lot of problems in India and a foreign country. The mother country completed the two processes one is a collection, and another method is manually segregation of valuable materials from E-waste. The focus of the work is E-waste transformed to useful any light weight product. An electronics industry Printed Circuit Board (PCB) usual routeing method to making different sizes of powder and poured to outside land. The Collected PCB powder from industry, which converted to convenient for manufacturing component like domestic's, sports and agriculture purpose to make the static part. In this work discarded PCB powder isolates to sieve 80-micron size, a matrix of carbon fibre is universally used to reinforce composite materials to produce robust and lightweight with bonding material of epoxy resin to make industrial safety helmet by compression moulding methods. As per ANSI Z89 standard the analysis mechanical properties and evaluate the results of both the composites of PCB, carbon fibre of helmet and polypropylene helmet.

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk, and Sarah Rivett

LATIN AMERICAN Religious Transformations in Early Modern Americas. Edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. [The Early Modern Americas.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. vi, 352. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4654-4.)The ten contributors to this book edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett achieve their goal of producing cross-disciplinary volume that grasp[s] complexity and variety of [Atlantic] colonial world as it augmented, transformed, and challenged range of Christian beliefs (p. 20). The editors' introduction is followed by chapters in Part I: Comparisons by John H. Elliott, Ralph Bauer, and David A. Boruchoff; Part II: Crossings by David D. Hall and Asuncion Lavrin; Part III: Missions by Matt Cohen, Junia Ferreira Furtado, and Carmen Fernandez-Salvador; and Part IV: Legacies by Teresa A. Toulouse and Sandra M. Gustafson.Elliott's chapter appropriately begins work by differentiating between Indian societies encountered by Spanish and English. He emphasizes imperial projects of these mother countries and concludes that conquerors found it necessary to adapt their ideas and rituals to their new environment . . . [and that] accommodation and selective adaptation were order of day not on one side of religious encounter only, but on both sides (p. 38). Bauer examines Spanish and especially English attitudes about religions of people whom they encountered. If, at beginning of their conquests and colonies, Spaniards were more predisposed than English to view native religions in satanic terms, by late-sixteenth century writers from both countries associate[d] Native American religions not only with paganism but with Satanism (p. 77). Boruchoff focuses on South America to demonstrate early efforts by few priests, mostly Franciscans, to espouse best practices of Christian living in an effort to convince natives to emulate their conduct. He contrasts early example of these good friars by including five wonderful drawings by Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala and emphasizing general disrepute and disdain afforded Dominicans, Augustinians, and especially Mercedarians; last became known for their greed, impiety, wantonness, and cruelty (p. 92).Hall's engaging historiographical essay concentrates on New transatlantic politics and analyzes political circumstances and theological and cultural ideas that shaped the Reformed international (sic, p. 111). Lavrin studies unique experience of martyrdom in New Spain. Indigenous peoples in northern frontier proved to be difficult adversaries to crusading priests who viewed conversion of indigenous peoples as part of larger plan of salvation for all humanity (p. 133). Although most missionaries neither expected nor desired martyrdom, some sought glory and a shot at dying for its cause (p. 136).Cohen's historiographical essay examines changing religious forms of Europeans in North America during their first century of residence and calls attention to stumbling blocks to thinking interculturally about religion in early colonial New England (p. …

Spijtoptant Loe de Jong

Abstract Contrite Loe de Jong. Media censorship and the Committee of Action against Neo-Fascism (London 1944)On 10 June 1944 seven signatories issued a pamphlet accusing the Dutch government in exile of secretly preparing an authoritarian regime immediately to follow the German occupation. The members of this Committee of Action against Neo-Fascism belonged to the circle of Radio Orange, the Dutch broadcast organization based in London during the Second World War. The protesters were silenced by the Dutch government’s media censorship. Six of them withdrew their allegations hesitantly; but only Loe de Jong decided actively to support the government in restoring its tarnished reputation. This article traces his change of mind and corrective actions. De Jong later became the historian who dominated the historiography of the German occupation 1940-45 in his mother country. Smits explains how the scholar evaluated his previous conduct. He shows that De Jong did not present a genuine, impartial description of this incident in full detail. The historian neglected to mention that the Committee had indeed challenged the government in exile by arguing that that secret decision-making on the Dutch postwar democratic system was not a legitimate task.

Die Rolle der russischen Sprache in der Gegenwart

Abstract This article is devoted to the functioning of Russian language in the modern world and raises a few issues: What are the regions of Russian diasporas nowadays? Under what conditions can Russian language survive in the foreign countries? How does Russian language change in its mother country and outside? It is also under discussion how language norms transform in modern Russian. It is stated that liberalization in lexical and register choice is opposed to the requirements of grammatical accuracy. Grammar is still considered as a marker of good education and culture of a person.

State-Centric Realism Eclipsed: TNCs as the Rising Powerful Actors in the Age of Trade Liberalization

<p>This essay argues that the global trade liberalization, particularly since 1995, strengthens some transnational corporations (TNCs) to become more powerful. In this sense, some statements argued by state-centric realism have to be revised; however, doing that does not mean that realism is fully out-of-date. The case studies suggest that mother country, such as the U.S., is a critical agent for TNCs to project their power and/or to protect their vital interest in the global market. In other word, sovereign state, especially the stronger one, is still important under some specific conditions. Ironically, most countries in the global south are increasingly retreating from the stage of international trade while TNCs from the North are detaining many efficient means of control over technology, capital and even political access.</p>

Guest editors’ introduction: Nostalgia, Culture and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe

The end of communism in the USSR and its satellite states produced a wave of collective euphoria that had not been seen in Europe since May 1945. Nowhere was this excitement stronger than in the former socialist countries themselves, where many felt that service had, as it were, been resumed. As former Czech dissident Vaclav Havel put it at the time, after decades of following the wrong track, we are yearning to rejoin the road which was once ours too.1 Signs that things were returning to normal were everywhere: West Germans received their Os si neighbours back into the fold by giving each of them 100 West-Deutschmarks as so-called welcome money; Hungarians could once again sit alongside their Austrian cousins and thrill to La Traviata at the Vienna Opera; and Muscovites finally got to taste their first Big Mac. The socialist dream had been cancelled, but in its place there was to be another utopia, a consumerist paradise, buttressed by liberal democracy at home, and lasting peace abroad.Barely two decades later, there is, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, a new spectre haunting Central and Eastern Europe - the spectre of nostalgia. The idealization of the is, of course, a fundamental part of human nature. Regret for a lost idyll can often colour our way of looking at the world. Recalling memories of a bygone era, as Vladimir Jankelevitch has put it, sharpen[s] nostalgia and underline^] the irreversibility of the past.2 Until recently, nostalgia was essentially a private affair. Today, however, we can see a new type of nostalgia emerging, a collective form stretching over the entire area of the former USSR and its satellite states. This phenomenon is all the more paradoxical when one considers that the period on which this nostalgia is focused - the Soviet era - was once so roundly rejected by those who appear to feel it most keenly today. Perhaps this should not surprise us, however. As Svetlana Boym put it in her seminal work on the subject, [post-socialist] nostalgia became a defense mechanism against the accelerated rhythm of change and economic shock therapy.3 At one time this feeling was limited to emigres fondly reminiscing about their distant mother country. Now, however, it also appears to touch those who live where they always have, but whose homeland no longer officially exists.This new nostalgia has begun to attract considerable scholarly interest in recent years.4 It takes an astonishingly wide variety of forms, including the popularity among Berlin shoppers of the Ostpaket (East German products in their original packaging), the reaffirmation of stereotypical gender roles in Russian glamour culture,5 the reappearance of Soviet brands of chocolate and other fast-moving consumer goods, the rise of nationalism in countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, and the rehabilitation of long-forgotten artists or literary genres. This tendency to look at the through rose-tinted spectacles can also be seen in numerous published collections of Soviet photographs of the 1970s,6 or on countless social media pages, both institutional and personal.7 It is quite distinct from traditional forms of nostalgia, as the term Ostalgie, widespread in the former East Germany, suggests.8 Despite Serguei Oushakine's claim that this new kind of nostalgia does not aim at political restoration, there is often an important political subtext.9It is in the arts that this new (n)ostalgia is perhaps given its most complex expression. In her most recent novel, for example, Russian author Svetlana Alexievitch laments the demise of homo sovieticas.l0 A number of filmmakers and artists have also attempted to capture this sickness for the past (nost-algia). These include Stanislav Govorukhin, director of The Russia We Have Lost (Rossiia, kotoruiu my poteriali, 1992) and Wolfgang Becker, who is best known for Good bye, Lenin! (2003). In Moscow, the Memory Art exhibition in 2012 of paintings by Ukrainian artists Vlad Yurashko and Vika Shoumskaia, which took as its main theme the events of 1991 and their impact on collective consciousness, was followed by an international conference field in the city's Higher School of Economics, titled The USSR: Life After Death. …

Spatial contexts and firm strategies: applying the multilevel perspective to sustainable urban mobility transitions in Brazil

The Multilevel Perspective on Sustainable Transitions (MLP) has been widely used to explain different patterns of technological, societal, cultural and normative transitions in an integrated and systemic way. This framework has been used to analyze individual transportation based on internal combustion engine automobiles and to develop niches that can challenge the existing dominant regimes in favor of more sustainable urban mobility systems. In a recent and relevant work, Markard et al. (2012) thoroughly discussed MLP, highlighting gaps and research opportunities. One such gap is that much of the research developed using this framework was conducted primarily using European scenarios, omitting various aspects of regional or country diversity, or the role of firm strategies failed to be considered. Therefore, we propose to analyze and compare Brazilian and German case studies regarding sustainable urban mobility transitions. To accomplish this goal, we analyze the diffusion level and different characteristics that explain the current development level of four niches: electro mobility, car sharing schemes, intermodal transportation, and innovation in public transportation. Using the multiple case study method, we compare the sustainable mobility initiatives and innovations undertaken by two German automotive companies in Brazil and in Germany. The results of the research conducted with both companies show that mobility initiatives in Brazil remain very limited. Manufacturers remain much more concerned with selling traditional products (in a much faster growth market than in Germany) than with initiating more aggressive strategies oriented to mobility. Even in their mother countries, mobility innovations can be considered moderate. Our main conclusions are that mobility initiatives in Germany and in Brazil are very different for a number of reasons, such as different pre-existing infrastructures to support new mobility initiatives, public pressure for mobility solutions, different growth patterns concerning car sales and different institutional and legal conditions regarding public and private participation in mobility issues. Therefore, the MLP framework would generate different trajectories and outcomes; in addition, firm strategies should be considered in the framework, particularly in a sector such as the automotive industry, in which firms have considerable influence.