Peripheral Nations Research Articles

The 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre: The Cold War's Politicization and Internationalization of Everyday Life

Although the colossal ideological struggle between the U.S. and the Soviets raged and ravished the peripheral nations of the world and left no space unaffected, perhaps no other country in the world responded, reacted to, and altered the context of the Cold War in a more complex fashion than Mexico. Within this encompassing global context, the mindsets of both the students murdered and those directing the killings in the Plaza of the Three Cultures were molded less by the dictates of Moscow or Washington than by the more decentralized and localized ideologies, plans of action, and policies which evolved in the shadow of the macro level of the titanic superpower struggle. In this shadow world, the discontent of students grew to be global, disaffected, and revolutionary. The consequences of Mexico's Cold War politicization and internationalization of everyday life unfolded throughout the summer of 1968 and culminated on the night of October 2nd at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. On this night a student demonstration was to end in a hail of bullets. When the shooting ended, hundreds of people would lay dead or wounded; Army and police forces apprehended many of the survivors; now subjected to interrogation.

Political ideology and activism in football fan culture in Spain: a view from the far left

This study examines how left-wing ideology is articulated, displayed and enacted among organized groups of football fans in Spain. The left-wing political space in Spanish football fan culture is occupied by multiple autonomous but often interconnected points of organizational and activist activity characterized by ideological flexibility, heterogeneous identities and interests, and a diffuse message, and whose solidarity is based on a sense of shared struggle. Solidarity and identification among left-wing fan groups is built through the contestation of three issues: neo-fascism, racism and the increasing commercialization of football. The political beliefs and actions of left-wing fan groups in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia are further informed by peripheral nationalisms and the struggle for the revival of the historic communities. It is illustrated how left-wing fans promote and engage in collective social action at the local, national and transnational levels.

Revenge of the Optimum Currency Area

Revenge of the Optimum Currency Area

Left and Right in the Basque Country and Catalonia: The Meaning of Ideology in a Nationalist Context

Why are the Basques and Catalans the most left-wing societies in Europe? Treating peripheral nationalism and ideology as two orthogonal dimensions, the literature to date has not yet provided a systematic theoretical account of this pattern. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper explores how nationalism has marked the meaning of ideology in these regions. Contrary to the left, the right has been treated as the opponent of regional devolution. The findings highlight the need to revise the orthogonality assumption often made when employing these two dimensions in the study of public opinion in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Strategic Dimensions of Neoliberal Globalization: The Exporting of Labor Force and Unequal Exchange

In addition to environmental degradation and financial speculation, neoliberal globalization has created a complex strategy of capital internationalization led by large multinational corporations that is driving labor costs down to extreme levels. This strategy is based, on the one hand, on the establishment of global commodity chains based on outsourcing schemes and intra-firm trade, which operate in peripheral nations and in the form of enclaves; on the other, it employs international labor migration as a means to lower labor costs in central countries. Both mechanisms comprise a new rung in the international division of labor: the export of labor. This process has led to new forms of unequal exchange that are much more predatory than those involved in the exchange of raw materials for industrial products. This has led to a reintegration of a subordinate periphery to the center, increasing asymmetries between countries and pushing social inequality to unprecedented levels. The purpose of this paper is to empirically and conceptually analyze these fundamental aspects of contemporary global architecture.

Sports and Politics in Spain – Football and Nationalist Attitudes within the Basque Country and Catalonia

Nowadays, basing ourselves on the perspective of the ongoing process of globalisation, the mutual interaction between sports and both sociological and political dimensions cannot be denied. Currently, football is the global and widespread sport. Indeed, it has practically turned into a religion and has become a strong national identity builder in many countries (mainly in South America, Africa and parts of Europe). It is also the most important sport in the almost federalised and pluri-national Spanish state. However, it has not only been used traditionally to strengthen the Spanish national identity building process, but also to promote internal peripheral nationalism. Therefore, this research will analyse and substantiate the interaction between football and the regional and national cleavages (analysing the creation of national identities) in the Basque Country and Catalonia (within the Spanish periphery), compared to Madrid (as the main representative of the Spanish political centre). Thus, the Autonomous Communities (regional) selections, and the main clubs (Athletic de Bilbao, F. C. Barcelona) capacity for promoting national identity or nationalist attributed values, will be explored.

Romance in a Marriage of Convenience: The Missionary Factor in Early Cold War U.S.-Ethiopian Relations, 1941-1960*

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century evangelical missionaries were the primary American presence throughout Africa and much of the developing world. As the Cold War spread worldwide, and previously peripheral nations like Ethiopia achieved a new-found geopolitical significance, these religiously motivated Americans suddenly became significant players in the global conflict. While explicitly apolitical, many of these accidental diplomats nevertheless viewed the Cold War in essentially spiritually terms as a battle between “Christian” America and the “atheist” Soviet Union. It is not surprising, then, that while remaining neutral in word, between 1941 and 1960 the evangelical missionary community actively and successfully, if not always formally, promoted close ties between their own “Judeo-Christian” nation and Ethiopia's Christian Emperor.

Between exoticism and universalism: educational sections in Latin American participation at international exhibitions, 1860–1900

International exhibitions provide a good arena in which to study the circulation and transfer of educational ideas and practices in the second half of the nineteenth century. Structured around themes of industry, progress, and civilisation, and defined as ephemeral museums of the new world of commodities for the consumption of the masses, they organised an economic, visual, and political order that was closely linked to the desires of European imperialism. However tempting it is to see them as unidirectional impositions of the colonial centres on peripheral countries, the history of these exhibits is much more complex and intricate than a one-way transfer. The analysis of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico’s participation in the world fairs that took place between 1867 and 1900 shows that there were many negotiations and rewritings of these narratives at the national level. I will claim that Latin American countries had to deal with the tensions that emerged out of conflicting demands: on the one hand, they wanted to be considered civilised and progressive, which meant looking as European as possible, and on the other hand and simultaneously, their place was that of peripheral nations, often close to the colonial pavilions, and forced to display some exoticism and originality to satisfy the demands of the mass spectacle. It is interesting to note that each country produced its own response to these contradictory requests. A further claim made in this article is that these tensions were particularly felt in the educational sections, which tended to assume global forms but also had to show a degree of peculiarity. Finally, it can be concluded that one of the most important effects of the world fairs in national educational systems was not so much the import of ideas and technologies but the production of national narratives on the development of schooling and of legitimising discourses for its expansion in these countries.

Scrambling Narrative: Niedecker and the White Dome of Logic

Scrambling Narrative:Niedecker and the White Dome of Logic Ruth Jennison (bio) The Depression-era work of poet Lorine Niedecker, incubated in Wisconsin and quickened by contact with the American cosmopolitan core and transnational Surrealisms, provokes the following question: how do the spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis pattern the formal imagination of the revolutionary avant-garde? The crisis without binds to consciousness within; Niedecker's poetry, I argue, shows that the ruptured political and economic geographies that comprise American capitalism in the opening decades of the twentieth century come to corrugate interior life itself. Niedecker, we'll see, recruits these rich unevennesses to expose the ways in which the relentless march of syntax in the service of things as they are forecloses an anti-capitalist imagination of things as they might be. Niedecker's poetry, born precisely from such imaginative impulses, nurtures the breaks and swerves within, and the ultimate upending of, modernity's soi-disant "progress" narratives. In the essay that follows, I explore how Niedecker cultivates a poetics that embraces dissonance in geographical and psychic topographies. In doing so, Niedecker's work strives for what Language poet Ron Silliman has called "denarrativization," or the unbinding of available significations from "ideological unities" (323, 317). Thusly unbound, dissonant spatial and historical particulars recombine, and resignify, in a process of radical "renarrativization." Over the course of this process, a plurality of "larger narrative frames" sprouts from [End Page 53] the fissures of unexpected paratactical assemblies (323). The analyses that follow trace the molecular movements of this "renarrativization" in Niedecker's Objectivist-Surrealist work. The new "narrative frames" that emerge are dark and unvarnished, screening a host of unfreedoms that roil beneath the smooth surface of modernity's official histories. Niedecker's Progression (1933) and Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous (1935) emerged in intimate conversation with two contemporary currents within early twentieth-century poetics: Objectivism and Surrealism. While Surrealism's experimental forms and radical politics have enjoyed generous critical attention, Objectivism has only recently emerged as an object of general scholarship. Objectivism, initiated in New York City by Niedecker's close colleague, Louis Zukofsky, was a high modernism, but it was also a modernism whose practitioners remained in constant contact with the diverse and radical cultures which sprouted from crisis-driven cracks in the edifice of capitalism.1 Objectivism's numbers included Jews, Yiddish speakers, feminists, working-class women and men, rural dwellers, Communists, and first-generation immigrants. These non-hegemonic subject positions provided the foundational texture for Objectivists' lived experience of the "immense left force-field" of 1930s America (Jameson, Modernist 25). While the Objectivists shared with the canonical modernists an interest in experiment and innovation, they also held commitments to radical democracy and the realization of the cultural potentials simultaneously unleashed and underdeveloped by capitalist modernity, commitments which they saw as the political parallels of their artistic avant-gardism. The Great Depression is the crisis that furnishes the national and global conditions for the inception of Objectivism, along with the host of other revolutionary arts that were produced during what Michael Denning has called "the cultural front."2 The vastly asymmetrical relations between wages, profit, and the prices of commodities could no longer be papered over by an official ideology of their harmonious interdependence. All received notions of a "modern" progress balanced in its dispersal of benefits experienced a crisis of legitimacy. Unevenness was thrown into relief and intensified as the tectonics of this crisis widened the chasm between rural and urban forms of immiseration nationally, and between core and peripheral nations within the imperialist world system. For example, within the [End Page 54] United States, the lethal combination of climate crisis and economic depression led to a mass migration to Northern and Western urban centers, leaving rural areas subject to mechanized exploitation of the land and people.3 But if the Depression produced an even more intensified spatially organized immiseration, it also produced many conditions for a surge in political activism. The Depression, that is to say, was also the context in which American Communism, having incubated for decades, enjoyed its greatest growth and made its deepest organizational impression upon the broadest swath of the...

Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed (review)

Reviewed by: Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed Robert B. Kent Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed. Larry Rohter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2010. 289 pag., map, bibliography, index. Harecover $27.00 (ISBN 978-0-230-61887-9) In this modest volume, the author sets out to summarize the dramatic transformation of Brazil over the last half century from a sleepy peripheral nation, albeit a "sleeping giant", to an emerging world power. The author argues that the last fifty years have been the singularly most transformative period in the history of Brazil since the time of European contact and settlement in the 1500s. The book examines the country's half-century transformation since the mid-1900s from a wide range of social, economic, environmental, and political perspectives. The author, a journalist and long-time correspondent for Newsweek and the New York Times in Brazil, has covered the country for nearly 40 years and lived here for fourteen of them. In ten chapters, the book addresses key factors in the nation's transformation. Throughout the text the author puts issues in a meaningful historic context briefly, yet effectively. Early economic development and the boom-bust cycles that have characterized Brazil's economy for most of its history are detailed in the first chapter as is the political evolution of the country from a Portuguese colony, to a monarchy, and then to a republic in the late 1800s. Its early halting steps as a democracy in the first half of the [End Page 225] 20th century are chronicled as is the military dictatorship which finally ended in 1985 when democratic rule was restored. The next four chapters examine social and cultural issues. Chapter two discusses some of the country's most salient social and cultural characteristics. The widespread concept of jeito or "pull" to facilitate the movement of paperwork, to eliminate the inconvenience occasioned by the police at a traffic stop, or ease any number of bureaucratic or personal is discussed in some detail, as are the role of family networks, social class, and the importance, or lack thereof, of the rule of law. An examination of religious practices and as well as sexual mores and attitudes conclude the chapter. Race is confronted head-on in the third chapter where the myth of Brazil as "a racial paradise" is addressed. The country's history of slavery and the social practices and customs that stemmed from it are detailed here. Useful comparisons with the experience of African-Americans in the United States put the Brazilian experience in a more meaningful context. A frank discussion of the current socio-economic status of Afro-Brazilians is illuminating. The country's "tropical lifestyle" is highlighted in chapter four where the author focuses on three signature characteristics of Brazil's popular culture: the beach scene, Carnival, and soccer. In the suceeding chapter the author argues that the last half century has been a time of intense artistic innovation and development in Brazil. Here the influence that Brazilian musicians have had on music in Europe and North America is emphatically noted. Economic issues are the focus of the next three chapters. The transformation of Brazil into an agricultural and industrial world power in a few short decades is nothing short of phenomenal and the sixth chapter documents this rise. It argues that the vision and the political will to stabilize the Brazilian economy, to open it to outside markets and competition, and to maintain consistent and responsible economic policies through changing political administrations has paid immense dividends for the nation. Energy is one of the pillars of Brazil's present and future prosperity and chapter seven examines the nation's three key energy sectors; petroleum, ethanol, and hydropower. The Amazon region is the focus of chapter eight where its economic significance as well as its role in the national psyche is plumbed. The book's final two chapters examine the county's politics. Brazil's successful efforts to ascend to the world stage as a player in international diplomacy, trade, finance, and sport are presented in chapter nine. The last chapter, ten, updates the nation's contemporary political landscape to...

Storiografi, diplomatici e mitografici secenteschi tra Italia e Portogallo

This article examines the exchange that took place between Portugal and the Italian intellectual community during the 17th century from an historiographical, political and literary viewpoint. In particular, it investigates Italy’s response to the asymmetry that had traditionally characterized Portugal as peripheral nation on the one hand and empire on the other. An analysis is made of Italian historiographical works connected with the ‘union’ and the ‘disunion’ of Portugal with respect to Castile between 1580 and 1640, including the monographs of Girolamo Conestagio and Giambattista Birago Avogadro, as well as travel writings, historical and political essays (Bentivoglio, Botero, Venetian ambassadors, Laffi, Leti, Siri and Buonfiglio Costanzo) and literary works (Boccalini, Tassoni, Salvetti and Battista). Lastly, a detailed analysis is presented of the diplomatic confrontation between Fulvio Testi and F.M. de Melo, together with a look at how Sebastianism was received in Italy, focusing on the “faux Sébastien” and such renowned intellectuals as Sarpi, Pallavicino, Spontone, Torsellini and Conestagio, who wrote in verse.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Environmental Economic Geography

environment. Likewise,modern (post-1960) economic geography largely sub-disciplined itself around aninterest in employment (e.g. industrial geography) or in nature (e.g. environmentalgeography). Fortunately, the nature of the debate is changing rapidly andpolitical, business and environmental leaders have recognized that economicdevelopment and environmental sustainability, the two central challenges facingthe world in the twenty-first century, depend on each other as potentially mutuallycompatible imperatives. Recognition that economic evolution is driven byinnovations of all kinds that restructure relations between economy and environmentsupports this view. If these restructurings have been overwhelmingly negative forthe environment in the past, a re-calibration of institutional and technologicalinnovation towards a Green Paradigm that seeks to realize positive sum relationshipsbetween economy and environment is feasible. Moreover, a Green Paradigm needsto be both global in scope and sensitive to geographically uniqueness. Economy–environment relationships are distinctive in particular places and connected acrossspace; climate warming, for example, is a global phenomenon in which processesand outcomes are locally varied. The vital role for environmental economicgeography is to assess how place and space influence economy–environmentrelations that are site-specific, globally interdependent and multi-scalar, and toprescribe (local–global) relations that will realize economic and environmentalvalues. Normatively, with respect to the achievement of economic and environ-mental values: How should innovation systems be organized globally and locally?What is the proper distribution of economic activities? How should cities andresource peripheries be remapped? How should value chains that directly andindirectly link multi-faceted (resource, manufacturing and service activities)activities in the supply of goods and services for consumers best be organizedlocally and globally? These are some of the fascinating questions facing environmentaleconomic geography.

Conducting business in Greece: A brief for international managers

AbstractGreece has emerged in recent years as an attractive business destination for international companies. European Union membership and the adoption of the euro have greatly changed the Greek economy. This article outlines recent changes in the Greek political and economic environment and the opportunities and challenges that international managers face in Greece. Energy, technology, tourism, and food and beverage industries are the hot sectors of the economy where foreign investors are expected to concentrate their interest in the future. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Nation‐Form

It has been said time and again that the paradigm of Third World nationalism is the Hegelian narrative of lordship and bondage – the struggle for recognition. As the hegemonic petty‐bourgeois elite...

Images of The World in Brazil: International News in Two Daily Newspapers in 2006

The dependence of Brazilian press on the international news agencies suggests that, despite the evolution of technology which now facilitates the access to information, there has been no advance in the basic issues that motivated the debate on the equilibrium necessary in the worldwide circulation of information. The analysis of the journalistic content of the international news published in a specifc week of 2006 in the newspapers Jornal do Brasil, in Rio de Janeiro, and O Estado de S. Paulo, in Sao Paulo, despite the technological transformation in the last decades, shows that Brazil remains a peripheral nation, and the Brazilian foreign correspondents today play much more the role of war correspondents, with their professional movements generally guided by the degree of importance of and by proximity (not geographic, but that of varied interests) to the conficts that break out in diferent points of the planet.

Identity, nation‐state and football in Spain. the evolution of nationalist feelings in Spanish Football

This essay shows the importance of the identity component in the development of Spanish football from its birth at the beginning of the twentieth century, when football was organized at a regional level, until the present time when football reflects the democratic and post‐national Spain created after the arrival of democracy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The essay expounds the existence of four periods in the development of the nationalistic feelings with which Spanish football has been embodied: the pre‐national or regional period, the period of Spanish nationalization, the period of strengthening of peripheral nationalisms and the post‐national period. In order to explain each of these periods, the role and symbolic representation of the Spanish National Team, Real Madrid, Barcelona FC, Athletic de Bilbao, among others, will be examined.

El hispanismo autoritario español y el movimiento nacionalista argentino: balance de medio siglo de relaciones políticas e intelectuales (1898-1946)

This comparative essay on mutual influences between Spanish and Argentinian authoritarian nationalisms shows that overseas hispanophiles were inspired on different peninsular doctrinal sources, like the Menendez Pelayo's national-Catholicism, the liberalism of the Institucion Libre de Ensenanza, the Miguel de Unamuno's casticism, the Ortega's europeanism, the D'Ors' classicism or the Maeztu's Hispanidad. From half-thirties to half-forties, the different trends of Spanish nationalism integrated in the Francoist regime failed to impose the disappearance of alternative liberaldemocratic and peripheral nationalisms in the Argentinian political debate. Although authoritarian Spanish nationalism influenced the activity of Argentinian catholic intellectuals in different ways, their real effect was very relative, because they acted only as circumstantial models to some Argentinian political regimes. But their imperialist development and their relations with the fascist regimes at the beginning of the forties restricted their possibilities of influence in Argentina in a totally irreversible way.

The Fate of a Stereotype: Little Paris

“The French Connection”A CHRONIC IDENTITY CRISIS AND AN OBESSIVE INTEREST IN STRONG LEGITIMATING MODELS ARE PERHAPS THE MOST CHARACTERISTC maladies of the modern Romanian cultural consciousness. Like many other peripheral nations, Romania has always been in search of strategies for being accepted as a full-fledged member of the “western European club.” Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the interminable debates concerning national identity focused repeatedly on the cultural heritage of the Roman Empire and the Romance origins of the Romanian language. Membership of the national idiom in the club of Romance languages was viewed as an irrefutable proof of a western European connection and allegiance.

Agricultura e tecnificação: notas para um debate

O texto aqui apresentado traz uma reflexão sobre o processo de modernização da base técnica da agricultura, mas que foge à abordagem sugerida no próprio conceito de modernização, via de regra tomado como sinônimo de progresso ou como processo transformador de relações carentes de renovação. Para tanto, percorre um referencial teórico que explicita como o conceito de moderno tem sido acionado para legitimar idéias e práticas conservadoras, porque se pauta na suposta relação automática entre avanço tecnológico e desenvolvimento social. Destarte, explicita como a idéia de ruptura com o passado é uma forma de manipular o ideal coletivo de progresso social, e é nesse aspecto que o texto se prende, ao evidenciar quão impactantes têm sido as mudanças técnicas desencadeadas pela “Revolução Verde”. Discute-se, assim, o custo social e ambiental desse padrão de produção agrícola e seus reflexos na ordenação do espaço agrário e urbano, bem como na própria obstrução da soberania de nações periféricas como o Brasil.

Smoke and mirrors: the politics and culture of air pollution

IntroductionThe Emergence of Air Pollution as a ProblemPerceptions and E?ects of Late Victorian Air Pollution Invisible Evil: Noxious Vapor and Public Health in Manchester during the Age of Industry Public Perceptions of Smoke Pollution in Victorian Manchester Uplands Downwind: Acidity and Ecological Change in the Southeast Lancashire Moorlands The Smoky City between the Wars The Merits of the Precautionary Principle: Controlling Automobile Exhausts in Germany and the United States before Interpreting the London Fog Disaster Localizing Smog: Transgressions in the Therapeutic Landscape Air Pollution Policy TodayA Fine Balance: Automobile Pollution Control Strategies in California Who Owns the Air? Clean Air Act Implementation as a Negotiation of Common Property Rights Air Pollution in Spain: A Peripheral Nation Transforms Clearing the Air and Breathing Freely: The Health Politics of Air Pollution and Asthma Invisible People, Invisible Places: Connecting Air Pollution and Pesticide Drift in California Notes from the Field: Air Pollution Engineering as Cultural Experience The Social and Political Construction of Air Pollution: Air Pollution Policies for Mexico CityAfterword Contributors Index