pan-European Phenomenon Research Articles

Book Review: John FitzGibbon, Benjamin Leruth and Nick Startin (eds), Euroscepticism as a Transnational and Pan-European Phenomenon: The Emergence of a New Sphere of Opposition

Book Review: John FitzGibbon, Benjamin Leruth and Nick Startin (eds), <i>Euroscepticism as a Transnational and Pan-European Phenomenon: The Emergence of a New Sphere of Opposition</i>

Returning to Europe as Reluctant Europeans: Revisiting Trends in Public Support for the European Union in Central and Eastern Europe Twelve Years after the 2004 EU Accession

This paper examines less discussed aspects of Euroscepticism in Eastern Europe as a component of the institutional history of the 2004 EU enlargement. A focus on public support for European integration allows us to evaluate the consequences of the EU’s enlargement policy from the perspective of democratic legitimacy, as public attitudes demonstrate how institutions live up to the expectations of the citizens in a democratic setting. It also allows us to relate the legislative history of the eastward enlargement to its social impact and domestic political implications. The paper posits Euroscepticism as an unexpected outcome of the legal-institutional implementation of the EU enlargement policy. It argues that while East-European Euroscepticism defies clear categorisation as it fails to demonstrate consistent longitudinal trends not consistent across its performance evaluation, identity, and democratic legitimacy dimensions, it is indicative of the disconnect between the adjustment dynamics of the EU accession of Eastern Europe, accomplished at the elite level, and the broad-based public response to it. The core of East-European Euroscepticism is declining public trust in the European Union, its policies, institutions, and the economic benefits it generates against the background of general dissatisfaction with the workings of national and European democracy. The East-European publics have become increasingly sceptical of their representation as citizens whose voice ‘counts’ in the EU. They perceive the EU as less relevant to their personal situation although it represents well the interests of the Member States. Such contradictory evidence suggests that the conventional measures of Euroscepticism as a pan-European phenomenon need to be re-examined by exploring trends of continuity and change in public support for the EU in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of the 2004 enlargement.

Støbeforme af sten fra middelalderen – Massefremstilling af metalgenstande til verdslig og religiøs brug i Ribe

Støbeforme af sten fra middelalderen – Massefremstilling af metalgenstande til verdslig og religiøs brug i Ribe

Kingdoms, Communities, and Óenaig: Irish Assembly Practices in their Northwest European Context

Abstract This paper explores the nature of assembly practices in early medieval Ireland (AD 400–1100). It focuses specifically on the oenach, the pre-eminent assembly of each level of community and kingdom in Irish society, and it engages critically with how assembly as a topic has been traditionally understood and analyzed by Irish scholarship. Through analysis of the nature of the oenach, I suggest that the predominantly economistic interpretation of this institution by Irish scholarship is misplaced and that rather the oenach was an Irish equivalent of pan-European assembly practices. Accordingly, this paper explores the character of oenaig (plural of oenach) in the context of this pan-European phenomenon. Furthermore, some preliminary results from ongoing research offer insights into the archaeological manifestation of assembly practices, the spatial dynamic of assembly landscapes, and the implications of the same for our understanding of civil society, scales of identity, and the practice of assembly...

The Passion in English: Meditations on the Life of Christ in Michigan State University Library MS 1

This article examines English pre-reformation literary representations of the life and Passion of Christ. Central to this genre of writing is the Pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition of meditative writing; a pan-European literary phenomenon, whose influence extended into preaching, decorative arts, dramatic performance, and other areas. My focus is on a text much overlooked by modern commentators, the Middle English meditation on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ preserved uniquely in Michigan State University Library MS 1. Dating probably to the mid-fifteenth century, this text translates and adapts selected chapters from the key pseudo-Bonaventuran text, the Meditationes vitae Christi. I examine processes of textual translation and adaptation in this vernacular life of Christ, providing extensive comparison between the English adaptation and its Latin source. The picture that emerges from such analysis is of an English adaptation that provides substantial addition to the Latin in its attempt to enflame and guide pious sensibilities. Particularly notable is a sequence of sustained alliterative compositions, which have no parallel elsewhere in the pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus, and which show the original approach of an English writer to the late-medieval religious imperative towards compassion and profound empathy with Christ and his mother. I conclude by examining the close textual links between the text in the Michigan SU manuscript and another Middle English Passion treatise better known to scholarship, the Privity of the Passion of c. 1400.

Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages

Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages

Combating In-Work Poverty in Continental Europe: An Investigation Using the Belgian Case

AbstractRecent studies find in-work poverty to be a pan-European phenomenon. Yet in-work poverty has come to the fore as a policy issue only recently in most continental European countries. Policies implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably in-work benefit schemes, are much discussed. This article argues that if it comes to preventing and alleviating poverty among workers, both the policy options and constraints facing Continental European policymakers are fundamentally different from those facing Anglo-Saxon policymakers. Consequently, policies that work in one setting cannot be simply emulated elsewhere. We present microsimulation derived results for Belgium to illustrate some of these points. Policy options discussed and simulated include: higher minimum wages, reductions in employee social security contributions, tax relief for low-paid workers and the implementation of a stylised version of the British Working Tax Credit. The latter measure has the strongest impact on in-work poverty, but in settings where wages are compressed, as in Belgium, a severe trade-off between coverage and budgetary cost presents itself. The article concludes that looking beyond targeted measures to universal benefits and support for employment of carers may be important components of an overall policy package to tackle in-work poverty.

Combating In-Work Poverty in Continental Europe: An Investigation Using the Belgian Case

Recent studies find in-work poverty to be a pan-European phenomenon. Yet in-work poverty has come to the fore as a policy issue only recently in most continental European countries. Policies implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably in-work benefit schemes, are much discussed. This article argues that if it comes to preventing and alleviating poverty among workers, both the policy options and constraints facing Continental European policymakers are fundamentally different from those facing Anglo-Saxon policymakers. Consequently, policies that work in one setting cannot be simply emulated elsewhere. We present micro-simulation derived results for Belgium to illustrate some of these points. Policy options discussed and simulated include: higher minimum wages, reductions in employee social security contributions, tax relief for low-paid workers, and the implementation of a stylised version of the British Working Tax Credit. The latter measure has the strongest impact on in-work poverty but in settings where wages are compressed, as in Belgium, a severe trade-off between coverage and budgetary cost presents itself. The article concludes that looking beyond targeted measures to universal benefits and support for employment of carers may be important components of an overall policy package to tackle in-work poverty.

A Tale of Two Europes: European Regions from Berlin to Lisbon

One of the lesser noted elements of the Lisbon Treaty (and Treaty on a Constitution for Europe that preceded it), was the limited but significant influence that Europe's regions were able to exert of the process. Regional successes at Lisbon included the inclusion of local and regional levels into the concept of subsidiarity and the right of the Committee of Regions (CoR) to challenge the Commission before the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This regional renaissance came as something of a surprise as although the early 1990s had seen the brief flowering of the concept of the “Europe of Regions”, these hopes were to prove short lived. Even as regional governments in western Europe were flexing their political muscles, the European Union (EU) was looking to expand into areas where sub-national regional governance was weak or non-existent. This weakening of the regional tier, combined with the ineffective nature of EU regional access, particularly the Committee of Regions, led to disenchantment with the European project and turned some regional governments from Europhiles to mild sceptics. However, as the regional successes at Lisbon confirm, Europe's regions are back. This paper traces the rise and fall of the regional tier with particular reference to the changing nature of the expanded EU. As the paper explores, the expansion to the east has changed the very nature of the regional level with the eastern European Member States developing very limited forms of regional governance. In fact, the limited regional successes achieved at Lisbon obscures a continuing paradox within the EU. Although there continues to be pressure for greater regional involvement at the European level, the regional level is not a pan-European phenomenon. It is largely driven by autonomous “legislative” regions, which are a feature of western European states alone. This paper concludes by briefly examining this imbalance and its consequences in a post-Lisbon Europe.

Simulation of astronomical aspects of Middle Neolithic circular ditch systems

Introduction The oldest Middle European monuments (approx. 4850/4750 – 4550/4500 BC) were presented in the Lower Austrian County Exhibition at Heldenberg in 2005 (Daim & Neubauer, 2005). The Middle Neolithic circular ditch systems, or Kreisgrabenanlagen (KGA), are known all over Middle Europe. These wooden monuments form a first pan-European phenomenon, crossing the cultural borders defined by the archaeological material record. One third of the approx. 135 monuments known so far are found in...

Bronzealderens keramik – En kilde til forståelse af kommunikation og social interaktion i bronzealderen

Bronzealderens keramik – En kilde til forståelse af kommunikation og social interaktion i bronzealderen

People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Society in Prehistoric Europe

Stelae (also known variously as statue-stelae and statue-menhirs) are a pan-European phenomenon in fourth and third millennia b.c. Europe and are clearly associated with the social transformations characterizing Europe in this period. While the varying traditions of stelae, from the Ukraine to Iberia, differ considerably, they also share a set of general aesthetic choices towards representing the human body, reducing the body to a rigidly schematic, highly stylized with a widely shared geometry and with emphasis upon its surface as a canvas for social marking, particularly of gender. This paper reviews the aesthetic choices involved in stelae and relates them to the changing social contexts of later prehistoric Europe.

PANOPTIC VISIONS OF LONDON: POSSESSING THE METROPOLIS

The role of sight in the experience of the metropolis as a cultural artefact had a special significance in the opening years of the nineteenth century. The visual register of the city was at once static – the panoptic vision – and fluid – the mobile and subjective gaze of the flâneur/euse. This scrutiny of the city as cultural capital operated on several levels. I want to demonstrate the complexities of the interaction of city, consumer/viewer and the role/agency of the textual/visual interlocutor. Any exploration of London as cultural capital must take into account this broader pan European phenomenon. The aim here is not to produce a comparative history, but rather to benefit from the specific points of contact between London and its near neighbour Paris as regards the consumption of the city and its emergence as cultural capital by a range of publics. My frame is the Benjaminian notion of the city as fragment or miniature as played out in his Arcades Project

The Constitutionalization of European Contract Law: Judicial Convergence and Social Justice

A form of contract law constitutionalization known by most European legal systems is the horizontal effect of fundamental rights and constitutional principles. This paper presents a comparative overview of fundamental rights adjudication in the private law of ten EU Member States. It draws attention to the spontaneous judicial convergences in contract law, which enable us to speak of the common ‘fact patterns’ of horizontal effect. This paper aims to demonstrate two theses: first, this horizontal effect is a pan-European phenomenon, not necessarily linked to a particular national legal culture. Second, horizontal effect in contract law is not politically neutral but inspired, at least in its application by national courts, by policies of social justice.

“Царская вера”: Массовые обращения католиков в православие в северо-западном крае российской империи (1860-е гг.)

SUMMARY: Mikhail Dolbilov explores the broad state-led campaign of conversion to Orthodoxy in the Western borderlands after the January uprising of 1863. The author situates his research in the context of recent studies of religion and confession in the Russian empire that highlight the secular and etatist approach of the imperial government to the Orthodox Church and conversion to Orthodoxy. Focusing on middle-rank bureaucrats who were in charge of confessional policy in the Western borderlands, Dolbilov argues that the development of popular Catholicism (as a pan-European phenomenon of moving toward a more visceral and mystical mode of religiosity) brought about a perception of Catholicism as ill-suited for the collective identification of subjects with the sovereign. The author analyzes in detail the growing desire of middle and high ranking functionaries to engage in an interventionist policy by way of using police and administrative coercion in the process of converting of the local Catholic population to Orthodoxy. The author further analyzes the details of the conversion campaign with accompanying misdemeanors, violence, and fraud. He notes that this large scale social engineering effort to link political allegiance with confessional status brought about unexpected consequences. It exacerbated conflicts between local functionaries and high-ranked bureaucrats, as well as those between the Orthodox community in the Western borderlands and newly converted Orthodox lay people. The article concludes with an analysis of the failure of the state-led conversion campaign, the key to which was the growing concern with the spread of atheist ideas and concomitant rise of political radicalism. The author infers that the Western borderlands’ campaign demonstrated the limits of mass proselytizing and interventionist policy in a confessional state and suggests that it ushered imperial bureaucrats toward the path that ultimately resulted in the acceptance of freedom of conscience in 1905.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance ed. by Roberta L. Krueger

REVIEWS her project is ambitious in its scope across historical periods and geographic boundaries. Her first chapter, for example, ranges from the Babylonian Talmud to the trial of Joan of Arc, her second chapter from the Acts of Paul and Thecla (c. A.D. 185–95) to the thirteenth-century Legenda aurea, and the third includes German, French, Italian, and English romances. Although the range of her analysis is impressive, its breadth precludes a more local analysis of the particular cultural forces, politics, and institutions shaping the differences and continuities in virginity testing. Kelly is a good storyteller and her book is packed with anecdotes and short tales of the weird and the marvelous that call out to be repeated. Through the variety of examples that she includes, Kelly makes an entirely convincing case for the cultural construction of the belief that virginity can be physically tested, but I would have liked to see a more ambitious central claim for which particular factors contribute to this ongoing construction. Finally, while she alludes to performativity in her chapter on the ordeal, recognizing the relevance of such an approach to her chosen topic, in fact, despite her title, performance theory plays a disappointingly small part in her project. Nonetheless, this book addresses a fascinating subject and presents a wealth of provocative material and analysis. Emma Lipton University of Missouri-Columbia Roberta L. Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xix– 296. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. This new volume in the Cambridge Companions to Literature series offers a useful addition to medieval scholarship and an introduction to the complex topic of medieval romance. Roberta L. Krueger has chosen, very ambitiously, to treat romance as a pan-European phenomenon. The essays thus form a wide-ranging collection, addressing origins and forms, manuscripts and social contexts, and the development of romance in France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and Spain. The choice is entirely justified in that romance found its origins in twelfth-century France but rapidly spread across Europe—though, as various of the es417 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:22 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER says argue, romance takes many different forms across the several centuries of its writing. Indeed, this fluid genre extends far beyond the medieval period: one might take the discussion back to the classical romance or ‘‘novel’’ and forward to eighteenth-century Spenserianism, the Gothic, Romantic writing, the pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson, Victorian novels of suspense, and twentieth-century romance, which ranges from Mills and Boon and its like, through novels of adventure and fantasy , to the work of writers such as Iris Murdoch and A. S. Byatt. Romance is not just a useful catch-all term, however. Writers from the middle ages on have chosen to define their imaginative fictions as ‘‘romance ,’’ and it is a notion of some importance to genre critics. Yet while its enduring power is evident, definition is slippery. Even to distinguish romance from other genres can be problematic, especially in periods beyond the middle ages, when romances can be plays, poems, and novels . Yet even within the medieval period, to differentiate between epic, saint’s life, conte, lyric, and romance can be complex: ‘‘romance,’’ writes Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ‘‘is the shape-shifter par excellence among medieval genres, a protean form that refuses to settle into neat boundaries prescribed by modern critics’’ (p. 13). There is then something of the impossible idealism of high romance in a study that attempts to examine medieval romance right across Europe from its inception to its later manifestations. Krueger aptly phrases the growth of romance in terms of a central romance motif, the journey or quest: the book is ‘‘intended as an introduction to the voyages, transformations and interrogations of romance as its fictions travel within and between the linguistic , geo-political, and social boundaries of Europe from 1150 to 1600’’ (p. 1). It is a genre always in transition, in process, in contact with other genres, in dialogue with its readers, in debate with itself. This study is unified by its generally sociohistorical approach, and its focus on French romance and on the twelfth century, with...

Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer by Laurence de Looze

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER LAURENCE DE LoozE. Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut,Jean Froissart, andGeoffrey Chaucer. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Pp. xi + 211. $49.95. Autobiography has been investigated by literary theorists, but strangely enough, little attention has been paid to medieval texts; when it has, it has hardly ever extended beyond the scope of a specific text. Following Philippe Lejeune's assumption of a "pacte autobiographique," Paul Zumthor could argue that both the concept of a personal 'T' and that of a clear distinction between history/truth and fiction were alien to the Middle Ages, and he overtly questioned the very existence of medieval autobiography ("Aucobiographie au Moyen Age1"). But the Middle Ages are not a monolithic era, and the late thirteenth century was marked by a shift in mentality. A number of issues were reconsidered, among them the modes of reading. What de Looze calls a pan-European phenomenon (I would reduce the geographical span to "West­ European," especially since he limits his demonstration to Spain, France, and England) has been favored by similar reexaminations. Typically, the terms auctor/actorlautor underwent significant changes and became asso­ ciated with auctoritas ("authority") and Greek authentin ("authenticity"), and the author's actual life and personal experience gave weight to the events of the text, particularly in vernacular literature. The contempo­ rary rise of single-author codices pertains to the same logic; more and more narratives cast the poet as protagonist. The author's status had utterly changed; because of the presence of a group of semiprofessional poets supported by grand patrons, the poet/patron relationship could easily become an element of the narrative. At the same time, the social and political crises of the time marked a turning point in Western cul­ ture. The ravages of the plague and of endless wars, the birth of new social classes, not to mention the overt Schism and "heretic" move­ ments, threatened the traditional order and gave birth to a "crisis of truth." The presence of two popes, the disturbing debates over the legiti­ macy of the English kings reactivated the thirteenth-century theory of two truths (one could believe one thing as a philosopher and another as a theologian). Although the latter theory had been condemned, its de­ nial of monologic truth was revived by Ockhamism. What Jacqueline Cerquiglini has called a "crisis of signs" (universals were mental con­ structs; the only true signs stood directly for actual experiences in the 346 REVIEWS real world) had considerable implications on the writing process.Fic­ tional truth could not be true; in literature there was no real difference between truth and lie, and the two could easily be inverted.It is not astonishing, then, that authors such as Guillaume de Machaut, Juan Ruiz, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer should use a number of equivocal signs, neither is it astonishing that the Liar's Paradox should have been so central to their work (Machaut claimed that "nothing was true except the lie") or that today's truth should become tomorrow's error (the decision of theJugement Behaingne is refuted as unjust in the Jugement Navarre, and, I would add, The Legend of Good Women recants Chaucer's earlier defamation of women in Troilus & Criseyde). There also arose a general scrutiny of generic classification.Being con­ structs of the mind, generic categories had to be unstable and relative. As Hans Robert Jauss has maintained, pure, stereotypical works became atrophied; great examples of a genre were generically mixed and upset the reader's expectations. Some of them lend themselves to a double reading, each based on different generic conventions; the level of fic­ tionality of an autobiographical narrative is particularly controversial, especially since it involves highly complex issues such as authorial in­ tentions and sincerity.De Looze proposes a reader-oriented typology of autobiographical writing and delineates four major categories-autobi­ ography, autobiographical fiction, autobiographical pseudo-fiction, and pseudo-autobiography: "Autobiography implies a perception of nominal identity between the author and the T of the narrative and a reading of the first-person narrative as sincere" (p.27).The reader does not suspend disbelief and opts for a...