Postwar Attitudes Research Articles

Perceptions at War: Exploring Public Attitude Formation in the Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict

Abstract The post-2020 escalations in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, culminating in the Azerbaijani military offensive of September 2023 and the subsequent mass exodus of the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, once again underscored the persistent deadlock in the peace process and the failure to achieve compromise. This article aims to analyze the genesis of maximalist attitudes within Armenian and Azerbaijani societies in the years preceding the 2020 war, as well as the factors contributing to the endurance of these attitudes in the years that followed. Drawing on the analysis of maximalist attitudes formation during the interwar period (1994–2020), the research delves into the obstacles encountered by peace activists and peacebuilders in their efforts to counter dominant nationalism, alongside other challenges and structural impediments in the peacebuilding process. Finally, the study investigates the determinants that shaped the post-war attitudes in Armenia and Azerbaijan preceding the pivotal events of September 2023.

‘I suppose I’ve never been really right since the war’: Traumatised Masculinities in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey Novels

The shell-shocked ex-serviceman was a controversial and troubling figure in interwar society. While the soldier was an ideal of masculinity in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, post-World War One, the presence of the wounded soldier questioned and challenged the authority and reliability of this masculine ideal. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels explore the gendered tensions pervading through interwar society by placing a vulnerable and shell-shocked soldier detective at the forefront of their narratives. Through the perceived stability and generic reliability of the detective genre, Sayers critiques post-war attitudes to wounded ex-servicemen and details the impacts of the war and mental illness on concepts of masculinity, gender norms and the domestic space. Closely analysing the shell-shocked Wimsey in relation to performativity, employment and marriage, the article reveals an anxious and divided society that acknowledges the wounded soldier and a loss of pre-war gender norms but is ill-equipped and reticent to address the lasting and gendered impacts of industrial war.

The ionosphere: Undermining Britain's imperial power: Wireless and its impact on geopolitics and naval operations (1919–1927)

The transition of sea power from the battleship-dominated Royal Navy of the First World War to the carrier-dominated United States Navy of the Second is a much discussed topic in current historiography. This article investigates a small but important part of that transition, elements of which have been previously researched but where important connections have not been made and where, in current British historiography, the full picture has perhaps been hidden behind the achievements of one man – Guglielmo Marconi. The contribution of wireless to the transition of sea power had its roots in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. This research reveals that it involved a somewhat clandestine effort by the United States Navy to undermine British dominance in global communications, at that time based on submarine cables. It reveals how Britain's imperial obligations and a post-war need for greater control over their communications by Britain's colonies also contributed to undermining the Royal Navy position. By a thorough review and new interpretations of existing historiography, plus some additional archive material, this work identifies connections between geography, economics, technology and political will that were key in the United States Navy attaining a superior post-war position in wireless technology. It shows how these connections enabled the United States Navy to benefit from Marconi's discovery of the practical use of short-wave radio.

Ex-combatants thinking differently: attitudes to threatening the state in post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire

ABSTRACT Using data from 10 months of field research in Côte d’Ivoire, this article explores the question of why certain groups of ex-combatants in that country are interested in posing a threat to the state, while others are not. It finds that demobilised pro-Gbagbo fighters who have received the least from the post-conflict period are also those most apathetic about threatening the post-war order. The paper argues this is due to expectations among this group of combatants that they would receive meagre assistance in the aftermath of a conflict they had lost, and the perception that their post-war position would remain fixed. By contrast, those demobilised and reinserted Forces Nouvelles (FN) troops who had lofty expectations of the post-war period because of promises made to them during the conflict, were quick to become frustrated with the post-war reality and make aggressive demands of the government. The study underscores the importance of expectations management and effective communication strategies with ex-combatants in the aftermath of conflict.

Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration and the NHS in Post-War Britain. By Roberta Bivins

Recent media coverage of Max Moseley’s involvement in the 1961 by-election in Moss Side reveals the ways in which alarmist and overtly racist campaigns were directed towards non-White migrants in postwar Britain. Leaflets that were allegedly circulated at the time proclaimed, ‘Protect your health. There is no medical check on immigration. Tuberculosis, VD and other terrible diseases like leprosy are on the increase. Coloured immigration threatens your children’s health.’ This was certainly not the only time that public health served as a catalyst for public opinion. In 1962, for example, Pakistani migrants were required to wear vaccination badges following a smallpox outbreak, thus demonstrating the ways in which pseudo-scientific myths characterized postwar attitudes towards ‘the coloured invasion’. What is clear from these campaigns, as observed by Roberta Bivins, is that perceptions of foreign bodies have shaped both medical knowledge and immigration policies. Indeed, it is along these lines that Bivins, in the lucid and captivating Contagious Communities, uses a fascinating medicalized lens to understand the impact of postwar migration to Britain.

The Entanglements of Europe: History, Geography, Identity

Europe is a continent of extraordinary variety and diversity geographically, ethnically, nationally, culturally, economically and politically. Yet at the same time all its parts are and always have been so deeply linked by their destiny that this continent can accurately be described as a single albeit complex political entity. Anything crucial in any area of human endeavour occurring anywhere in Europe always has had both direct and indirect consequences for our continent as a whole. The history of Europe is, in fact, the history of a constant searching and reshaping of its internal structures and the relationship of its parts. Today, if we talk about a single European civilization or about common European values, history, traditions, and destiny, what we are referring to is more the fruit of this tendency toward integration than its cause.

Japan's Return to Great Power Politics: Abe's Restoration

Japan's Return to Great Power Politics:Abe's Restoration Kenneth B. Pyle (bio) keywords japan, shinzo abe, foreign policy, U.S.-Japan alliance [End Page 69] executive summary This essay explains how Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is engineering a seismic shift in Japan's foreign policy from a postwar position of dependence and subordination in the U.S.-led order to a proactive and independent role, which in the uncertain regional environment is likely to gain increasing popular support. main argument After more than 70 years of subordination in the U.S.-led world order, Japan is pulling free from its self-binding constraints and restoring an activist foreign policy not seen since 1945. Coming to power with a surge of conservative nationalist support in the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe has engineered Japan's return to great-power politics. He has achieved a historic reinterpretation of the constitution to permit collective self-defense, ended the ban on arms exports and other self-binding policies, and pressed for new offensive military capacity, all of which have made possible a much more cohesive and integrated U.S.-Japan alliance. Although Abe and the policy elite have had to override public opposition in returning Japan to this activist role, in such circumstances of transition in the international order, Japan has historically experienced rapid swings in geopolitical position. With the growing uncertainty of regional conditions, we should not be surprised if the pacifist identity that postwar generations have long embraced gives way and we see changes in the prolonged resistance of the Japanese public to revision of the constitution and to an activist and assertive foreign policy. policy implications • Japan will closely weigh the reliability of U.S. assurances and the future direction of U.S. policy in Asia, especially as they relate to the management of the nuclear threat from North Korea and to Japanese interests vis-à-vis China. • Japan's immediate priority will be to strengthen its alignment with the U.S., but in the longer term it will increasingly move toward a more independent foreign policy that offers greater autonomy and room to adjust to its perception of the shifting regional balance of power. • Although Abe appears likely to remain in office until 2021, even should his term be shortened, his policies now have a momentum that will be very difficult to reverse. These policies are supported by all likely LDP candidates to succeed him, and the political opposition is weaker than at any time in the postwar period. [End Page 70] In 2018, Japan is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its modern revolution, the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The nature of a country's modern revolution illuminates a great deal about the national character, the strategic principles, and the logic of a people. Just as 1776 tells Americans so much about ourselves—the ideals and purposes that we hold central—so the Meiji Restoration reveals much about the nature and purpose of modern Japan. The restoration was not a class upheaval proclaiming new values. Rather, it was a conservative nationalist revolution, carried out "from above" by a party within the old samurai elite and driven by the dangers posed by the Western imperial powers. Its purpose was to strengthen Japan, adapt to the changes in the external environment, restore the independence that was infringed by the West, and bring Japan into the company of the great powers. Over the next two decades, borrowing broadly from the Western powers, the Meiji Restoration achieved one of the most remarkable institutional innovations in world history: Japan became Asia's first rising power. This formative experience of Japan's entry into the modern world established a strategic style of realism and pragmatism in response to shifts in the international system. In the prime ministership of Shinzo Abe, we are witnessing a similar accommodation to changes in the international system. Like the Meiji Restoration—albeit on a more limited historical scale—Abe is engineering a foreign policy revolution carried out from above by a conservative elite. When his cabinet in 2014 approved a radical reinterpretation of the constitution to allow collective self-defense, Abe reportedly told leaders of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP...

Reconceptualizing, Measuring, and Evaluating Distance and Context in the Study of Conflicts: Using Survey Data from the North Caucasus of Russia

How does political violence affect the attitudes and beliefs of affected populations? This question remains of central concern to the discipline of conflict studies. In response, we make the case (by empirical example) that the choice of spatial and temporal ranges of analysis influences conclusions about the associations between exposure to political conflict and subsequent opinions. Using 2005 survey data from Russia's North Caucasus and georeferenced conflict data for the preceding 2 years, we find that violence affects levels of ethnic pride, trust in public institutions, and preferences for ethno-territorial separation, as well as other postwar attitudes. By designating a wide range of distance and time boundaries for capturing a conflict/attitude relationship, we argue for a more inductive style of analyzing theoretical propositions than is usually found in the field of conflict research. Our research is framed within the theoretical and empirical discussions of contextual-, neighborhood-, and community-level drivers of individual-level outcomes from the political geography and conflict studies literatures.

Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination

AbstractThe recreation of Jenny Lind's first American concert by soprano Frieda Hempel in 1920 was a popular success, but raised a number of questions for critics. Examining its reception—and that of the concert on tour in Britain—shines light on postwar attitudes toward music history, as manifest in responses to particular repertoires, and to sound recordings. Hempel's hybrid programs, which included operatic coloratura arias, lieder, and American popular song, ran counter to the trend elsewhere toward specialization. At the same time, they resonated with attempts to cultivate a newly minted sociocultural group, the middlebrow. And, while the Lind project on many levels strove for historical accuracy, on others it overturned ideas of authentic performance. An altogether more complex picture of vocal performance in the age of mechanical reproduction thus emerges.

Defining the “Problem”: The Development of Postwar Attitudes toward Bruckner Versions

Concern with the “Bruckner problem” was one of the most important elements in the scholarly and popular reception of Bruckner's symphonies in the second half of the twentieth century. The conventional position was to accept only the “original versions” as published by modern editors, while dismissing as corrupt the versions published during the composer's lifetime. This view of the Bruckner versions was forged by German-speaking scholars in the 1930s, and cultivated by English-speaking scholars and critics in the postwar era. Until now, the pivotal process by which this view came to be embraced has been largely overlooked, but is worthy of examination to show how it has shaped the appreciation of Bruckner's symphonies in the English-speaking world.

These Great Urbanist Games: New Babylon and Second Life

Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka Constant), 20th-century painter and architect and founding member of the Situationist International, is perhaps best known for his ambitious project of unitary urbanism, New Babylon, on which he worked from 1958 until 1973. This proposed city (which would, theoretically, cover the globe) was intended to prompt all people to express their creativity through their constant reconfiguration of its open and malleable living space. Explicitly designed for homo ludens, in it social life was to be constituted by architectural play. But, as Mark Wigley has noted, was the whole point of New Babylon but not its mode of production. As designer of this universalizing and revolutionary play-space, Constant's role entailed the contrivance of open-endedness, and thus implicitly relied upon the very artistic authority that the Situationists had rejected (Constant left the Situationists in 1960). Today, fifty years after he began his project, we can witness similar ideals and contradictions in the virtual world Second Life, an architected social space which also claims to be an infinitely malleable forum for creative expression. In this article I trace to what extent the ideological foundations of both of these projects can be linked to postwar attitudes toward technology and authority on both sides of the Atlantic, and explore how they each draw upon notions of play in distinctive ways. Arriving at the same ideals and contradictions via separate but related paths, New Babylon and Second Life reflect two responses to the challenges of design and post-bureaucratic hopes for the productivity of play.

THE GRAND DIVERSION: PLAY, WORK AND VIRTUAL WORLDS

Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka Constant), twentieth-century painter and architect and founding member of the Situationist International, is perhaps best known for his ambitious project of unitary urbanism, New Babylon, on which he worked from 1958 until 1973. This proposed city (which would, theoretically, cover the globe) was intended to prompt all people to express their creativity through their constant reconfiguration of its open and malleable living space. Explicitly designed for homo ludens, in it social life was to be constituted by architectural play. But, as Mark Wigley has noted, “play was the whole point of New Babylon but not its mode of production”. As designer of this universalizing and revolutionary play-space, Constant’s role entailed the contrivance of open-endedness, and thus implicitly relied upon the very artistic authority that the Situationists had rejected (Constant left the Situationists in 1960). Today, 50 years after he began his project, we can witness similar ideals and contradictions in the virtual world Second Life, an architected social space which also claims to be an infinitely malleable forum for creative expression. In this article the author traces to what extent the ideological foundations of both of these projects can be linked to postwar attitudes toward technology and authority on both sides of the Atlantic, and explores how they each draw on notions of play in distinctive ways. Arriving at the same ideals and contradictions via separate but related paths, New Babylon and Second Life reflect two responses to the challenges of design and post-bureaucratic hopes for the productivity of play.

Secrets and Puzzles: Silence and the Unsaid in Contemporary Italian Writing by Nicoletta Simborowski (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2005 843 Secrets and Puzzles: Silence and the Unsaid in Contemporary Italian Writing. By NicolettaSimborowski. Oxford: Legenda. 2003. x+177 pp. ?35- ISBN 1900755 -74-2. The power of suggesting more than what is said is not restricted to poetry alone, but is a characteristic of the best prose as well. A classic example of this technique in Italian literature is to be found in Manzoni's / promessi sposi, where the simple phrase at the end ofthe episode ofthe nun of Monza, 'la sventurata rispose', suggests infinitelymore to the imagination of the reader than do the several pages of scabrous details of the misdeeds of this nun in Fermo e Lucia, the earlier version of the novel. However, the notion ofthe unsaid, as much as itis fascinating, and indeed central in the discussion of literature, is elusive and open to interpretation; hence, it must be pinned down. This is what Nicoletta Simborowski does in the firstchapter of her thought provoking volume, where she provides the theoretical background for a discussion of the unsaid, summarizing the contributions of theorists including Ducrot, Derrida, Kermode, Bakhtin, Barthes, Blanchot, Lyotard, Bloom, and Collini. The importance of twentieth-century critical approaches is also underlined: these include feminist criticism, work in the fantastic, and psychoanalytical studies. The volume is divided into six chapters. After the introductory section mentioned above there are four chapters, each devoted to the analysis of a specific text by a well-known post-war Italian writer, respectively Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, and Francesca Sanvitale. The sixth and finalchapter is not concerned with the literary analysis of a text but examines more generally the phenomenon of the Einaudi publishing house, to which these authors are connected, 'in the context of post-war attitudes and tastes in literature' (p. 5). The choice of the period and ofthe authors is significant. Simborowski finds that, despite living in a period characterized by freedom of expression (following the era of Fascist censorship), these writers decided, at a certain point in their career, to censor their own work. She provides examples of omission or self-censorship, and elicits curiosity as to the reasons behind the censorship. The second chapter examines Levi's Se questo e un uomo according to a poetics of ritegno,or restraint. Through ritegno,which is seen here as 'both a stylistic technique and an emotional response' (p. 29), Levi does not burden his readers with oppressive details, but at the same time awakens in them an awareness of the enormity of what is not described. This element of reticence, motivated by respect for the reader, is seen by Simborowski as the key to Levi's success and to the approachability of his work on the Holocaust. The analysis is impeccable. Less convincing, however, and perhaps unfounded, is the discussion of Levi's alleged homophobia or unease with sexuality which, according to Simborowski, is expressed as distaste for Henri, one of the prisoners Levi meets in the concentration camp. This is an example of the arbitrariness to which the notion of the unsaid lends itself, and one wonders if the unsaid offers a useful means of investigation of the literary text when it is used as the basis of conjecture regarding the personality of the writer. The third chapter revolves around Pavese's novel La casa in collina and an earlier short story, 'La famiglia', which sketched the same theme and plot. Exclusions and elaborations in the novel, in comparison with the short story,highlight the protagonist's incapacity for commitment in both the private and the political spheres. This also permits an insightful analysis ofthe theme of 'youth', which in the novel stands for thoughtless, conscience-free violence and makes 'the novel a powerful condemnation of violence of any kind, including that perpetrated by the partisans' (p. 68). With these observations Simborowski sets out to reveal Pavese's concealed political agenda, which is that of justifying his choice of neutrality as well as encoding an apologia for the Fascist sympathies he entertained during the firstyears of the conflict. 844 Reviews The fourth chapter considers the family language implemented by Ginzburg in Lessico famigliare as a 'background music' which halts...

Through the Highball Glass

Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Postwar America. By Lori Rotskoff. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 336 pages. $45 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). In reading Lori Rotskoff's Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Postwar America, I found myself haunted by a scene from a film whose release coincided with the book's publication, Todd Haynes's homage to 1950s melodrama, Far from Heaven (2002). In it, the sparkling facade of a suburban cocktail party is shattered when the host, who drinks to dull the pain of his losing battle against homosexual desire, begins verbally abusing his long-suffering wife. The heroine—whose plans for the party have throughout the film signified her desperate efforts to shore up their crumbling marriage and idyllic image as "Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech"—moves swiftly to smooth over the incident, chiding, "Darling, don't you think you've already had enough?" even as she bustles to refresh her guests' cocktails. The scene crystallizes the key historical contradictions anatomized in Rotskoff's fascinating study of alcohol and marriage in postwar America: the simultaneous glamorization of social drinking and pathologization of "problem" drinking, the construction of alcoholism as symptom of a deeper crisis in masculinity, and the demand that the alcoholic's wife both preserve [End Page 489] the facade of normalcy and subordinate her own needs to her husband's therapeutic process. While alcohol plays only a supporting role in the film's dramatization of the rift between suburban ideals and painful realities, Love on the Rocks brings such moments into sharp focus, using the intertwined discourses of drink, alcoholism, and recovery as lenses through which to examine the larger ideological contradictions of postwar America. Rotskoff mines an impressive archive of historical evidence—from the professional discourses of psychologists, physicians, and social workers, to popular fiction and film, to the internal records of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Al-Anon. Building upon the now-familiar association of consumer culture and therapeutic discourse, Rotskoff argues that alcoholism emerged as "the primary, even paradigmatic illness of overindulgence by the 1950s" (234). Moreover, she makes a compelling case that examining such discourses of individual pathology and dysfunction can help us better understand the ideals and norms of the dominant culture, since the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like alcoholism reveal implicit norms about "healthy" masculinity, marriage, and family life. As models of "problem drinking" shifted from a moralizing discourse of "sin" targeted at working-class and immigrant others to a therapeutic discourse of "sickness" focused on white, native-born, middle-class family men, Rotskoff suggests, discourses of alcoholism and recovery redefined the white middle-class family no longer as an unquestioned norm but rather as an institution in crisis, wracked with contradictions that threatened to destroy it from within. A lucid, insightful, and richly documented cultural history, Love on the Rocks makes a valuable contribution to the growing scholarly and popular interest in "the darker underside of domestic life during the mid-twentieth century" (8).1 As the cocktail party scene from Far from Heaven suggests, postwar attitudes toward alcohol were deeply divided between an increasingly pathologized disease model of "problem drinking" and a normalization and glamorization of "social drinking" as a "tension reliever," "social lubricant," and hallmark of modernity (62). Post-repeal consumer culture celebrated heterosocial drinking—from the after-work highball to the suburban cocktail party—as a natural release from workaday pressures and as a pleasant ritual of companionate marriage and domesticity. At the same time, the figure of the solitary problem drinker provided the very standard against which "moderate" and "social" [End Page 490] drinking could be measured. Moreover, the emergent "disease model" of alcoholism, in striking contrast with the temperance-era indictments of "demon rum," located the problem not in the substance consumed but in the psyche of the problem drinker. Echoing Warren Susman's distinction between the culture of "character" and the culture of "personality," Rotskoff demonstrates that problem drinking was increasingly...

The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (review)

Book Reviews 157 theologians that the Americans who had the most fIrst-hand experience ofsuffering and oppression identify with the Jewish message of hope and justice while those who had the least proclaimed, whatever it might have meant, that God had "died." Clark Williamson Theology Department Christian Theological Seminary The Language ofSilence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, by Ernestine Schlant. New York & London: Routledge, 1999. 277 pp. $20.99. Ernestine Schlant'shighly focused study about West German fIctional narratives is a well written resource that raises signifIcant questions and challenges. Because she contextualizes authors and their narratives historically, culturally, sociologically, and psychologically, the reader gains a comprehensive image ofthe evolution ofthe central post-war issue in West German literature: the destruction ofthe European Jews and the always more or less defensive strategies authors employ over and against the horrendous crimes committed by their civilization. In covering the period from 1945 to 1990, Schlant demonstrates how German authors have reflected the collective consciousness of Germans in regard to the Holocaust while contributing through subtexts to the collective unconscious where Germany's atrocious history has by no means been "mastered."Auschwitz, as historical fact and as trope, remains for Germans botha point ofreference and a vanishing point. Schlant distinguishes the silence ofthe Holocaust-a silence over the horror of direct experience-from the silence about the Holocaust-the silence ofperpetrators and the succeeding generations that attempted to address that silence. Those attempts have been undermined for decades by Germany's "inability to mourn," even as our knowledge, interpretations, and understanding of Nazism and the Holocaust have increased since 1945. Schlant argues that "corning to terms" with the past is not equivalent to "working through," fOf "it leaves the victims and the crimes as unmourned as they have always been" (p. 14). She accepts Margarethe and Alexander Mitscherlichs' contention that Germans were unable to mourn the loss oftheir emotional investment in the Third Reich as they redefIned the Hitler era by perceiving themselves as deceived and victimized by the Nazis. This self-victimization is a major defense mechanism in post-war narratives and represses the victimization ofJews. Schlant argues that the ability ofauthors and their fIctional characters to connect affectively with the victims ofthe Holocaust is necessary for any genuine mourning that "works through" to an authentic "restitution ofpersonal identity." Some readers may take issue with this argument. It is very possible that private grief can eventually mature into the restitution of a mature personal identity, but I seriously doubt if such an ideal grieving process is ever effected by the collective 158 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 consciousness of an entire people, especially in mass societies. Schlant could have challenged the Mitscherlichs' paradigm ofmourning, useful as it has been since 1967 as a frictional device in our questioning of Germany's post-war attitudes towards Nazism and the Holocaust. As German narratives reveal through their rhetorical strategies, it is impossible to grieve over the Third Reich; the Holocaust, on the other hand, demands a mourning for which closure would be highly problematical. Schlant's discussion ofrepresentative German authors is most insightful when she discusses the subtexts, points ofambiguity, blanks, or over-determined narratives since 1945. The mythic Nul/punkt (zero hour) was no new beginning because "knowledge of the Nazi past was channeled into denial and repression" along with "the most heavily charged and tabooed word of all-'Jew'" (pp. 24-25). Even authors such as Boll and Grass rely on stereotypes and sentimentality towards Jews and Jewish suffering. This repression continues in the "generational discord" evident in the autobiographical fictions of the next generation which experienced itself as victimized by the fascist child-rearing of their politically and ethically compromised parents (p. 82). Her discussion ofHanns-JosefOrtheil's autobiographical novels about his parents reveals that by the late 1970s German authors, acutely aware ofthe complexities ofa corrupted language, had begun to probe more profoundly into the past of their parents. Although Schlant's discussion is chronological, each chapter traces the thematic progression from silence to articulation, from "ruptures and displacements" to the question of personal restitution. She sees Gert Hofmann's Veilchenfeld (1986) as an empathic attempt to...

Models of Capitalism in the New World Order: The UK Case

In the debate over economic performance which has preoccupied UK policy makers for the last four decades, foreign ‘models' of more successful capitalisms elsewhere have been an important point of reference. Those models have been variously market-led (USA), state-led (Japan) or negotiated/consensual (Germany/Sweden). Of late the UK's own internal economic and social settlement has itself been offered as a viable model for once successful foreign economies now in competitive difficulties. The key features of these various models are analysed, and the UK's changing post-war position on the map of models is traced. The changing fortunes of these models are then related to developments in the global economy; and an assessment made of the adequacy (and desirability) of the kind of economic order now being canvassed in the UK by the present Labour Government.

KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING: PEACE DAY IN LUTON, 1919

In Britain immediately after the First World War there were widespread social and political challenges to the old liberal order. In the face of these tensions, Peace Day celebrations designed to demonstrate national consensus were arranged throughout Britain in July 1919. In Luton, Bedfordshire, Peace Day ended in a riot during which the Town Hall was set ablaze. The riot has been portrayed as an ex-servicemen’s protest, but closer analysis based on court records, government intelligence briefings and newspaper reports indicates that wider grievances were important such as housing, unemployment and the post-war position of women. Similar concerns were shared nationally, but in Luton conflict was sparked by the council’s exclusion of a variety of local groups from the official events and its refusal to countenance alternative communal activities. This study throws light on the relationship between public spectacle and public disorder, demonstrating how festive events can be occasions for social conflict as well as consensus.

Conservatism of Israeli Jews and Arabs in the aftermath of the gulf war

The 1991 Gulf War, in which the Israeli Arab population backed the position taken by Iraq against the U.S., which was supported by Israeli Jews, has had some attitudinal effects on the Israeli population. Post-war attitudes of Jews and Arabs on four major factors of conservatism, namely militarism, ethnocentrism, religiosity and anti-hedonism were significantly more extreme than their pre-war attitudes on the same factors. In addition, pre-war intergroup differences, which were found on three of the four factors were found to have intensified in a post-war examination.

France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Map 1. Introduction Part I. 1850-1989: Nineteenth-century origins of French Islamic policy: 2. French Islamic policy in Senegal and Algeria Part II. 1898-1912: The Fear of Islam: 3. The fear of Islam 4. Education policy and Islam 5. French Islamic policy in crisis: the Futa Jallon 1909-1912 Part III. French Scholarship and the Definition of Islam Noir: 6. Scholar-administrators and the definition of Islam Noir 7. The First World War Part IV 1920-1940: The French Stake in Islam Noir: 8. Post-war attitudes to Islam 9. The French stake in Islam 10. The 'rediscovery' of Islam 11. Epilogue 1940-1960 12. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

A Trade Strategy for the United States

Krasner considers the decline of the global economic power the United States enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1960s and prescribes a policy of specific repricocity that aims not at restoring the country's postwar position but at allowing it to compete effectively in an emerging and changing economic climate. Specific repricocity focuses on short term pay-offs, outcomes, and differences in the domestic institutional arrangements of major economic partners. It aims at maintaining global stability while supporting the national best interest.