European Struggle Research Articles

Fitness: The Early (Dutch) Roots of a Modern Industry

While sports and physical education originated in the nineteenth century, fitness on the other hand is generally seen as a typically late-twentieth-century phenomenon. In order to understand how the modern fitness culture has become what it is today, it is important to recognize how some of its roots had already evolved more than a century before. This article uses early developments of the ‘fitness industry’ in the Netherlands between 1850 and 1900 as an illustrative example. Against the background of the European struggle between Continental and Anglo-Saxon systems of physical education and sport, this article focuses on the connections that were made between industries, ideas, buildings, fitness equipment, manuals, magazines and the early body artists and entrepreneurs. The convergence between the early fitness industry and the ‘self-help industry’ contributed to a crucial shift from the ‘acrobatic, distant body’, to the commercialized, fit and good-looking bodies which were displayed and ‘sold’ as inspiring examples. This article questions some of the crucial preconditions of these processes of globalization of the early fitness industry.

Book Review: Rethinking Christendom: Europe's struggle for Christianity

Book Review: <b>Rethinking Christendom:</b> Europe's struggle for Christianity

Technical progress - but an uphill struggle for Western Europe

Geoffrey Pritchard rounds up developments from Rapra Technology's plastics additives conference Addcon held in Frankfurt, Germany recently. His report addresses the current state of the additives market in Europe and well as some recent technical developments.

The Struggle for Europe: The History of the Continent since 1945 * A History of Europe in the Twentieth Century

The Struggle for Europe: The History of the Continent since 1945 * A History of Europe in the Twentieth Century

The Two-way Street to Integration for Europe's Muslims

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE IN THE PRINT EDITION ONLY. The current tensions in Europe regarding Islamic expressions in public life are not so much a clash of civilizations but a struggle for Europe's secularists and conservatives to come to terms with religious pluralism. While there has been significant legislation to curb Islamic expression and practices in Europe, some recognize that European Islam has positive potential for emphasizing reform and the interpretative license of ijtihad, and some countries are instigating imam training initiatives to encourage balanced religious education. While assimilation suggests that immigrants must adjust, integration implies give and take on both sides.

Temporary American citizens? British audiences, hollywood films and the threat of Americanization in the 1920s

In March 1927, the film columnist for the Daily Express declared that British film audiences’ enjoyment of American films was inextricably linked to their appreciation of the United States itself: ...

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe by Victoria de Grazia

Irresistible Empire: Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe Victoria de Grazia. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. There can be no question that the twentieth century brought forth a more global economy. The colonialism of past centuries opened markets in places previously unknown. By the twentieth century America had employed its industrial innovation and marketing to make inroads into new markets. American goods and services became available to people all over the world. Today McDonald's restaurants and Coca-Cola products are ubiquitous. One area on which America concentrated to acquire new markets throughout the twentieth century was Europe. With opportunities emerging from two world wars, and the devastation thereafter, America had the chance to establish itself as a world economic powerhouse by providing Europeans with products and business methods developed in America. In Irresistible Empire author Victoria de Grazia examines the twentieth century, America's Century, from the perspective of American industrial might, the intent to establish economic hegemony in Europe, as well as the irrefutable influence economics has had on events thereof. In the author's literary trek through the twentieth century, the reader gets a thorough look at specific events and examples which have made the American economy so powerful in Europe, and how policy decisions such as the Marshall Plan, may have been made from an economic paradigm, de Grazia demonstrates how, through consorted efforts, taking advantage of Europe's struggle in rebuilding its war-torn infrastructure, and anticipation to get back to peace, American business provided Europeans with necessities as well as luxury items. Through this effort, American businesses and associations went from a minor economic player on the world stage to part of a dominant and imposing economic system able to affect economic and political change from across the Atlantic. And she portrays the economic events and changes Europeans experienced in consumer culture without praise or condemnation. Fittingly, in the introductory chapter, the table was set for American advance into European markets via a speech by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to the first World's Salesmanship Congress in which he outlined ideas for American businessmen to sell goods abroad, particularly Europe. His charge to his audience, which echoed to American industry, was to develop goods that the foreign consumers want; to keep pace with consumer's taste, and to change accordingly. Promoting democracies of consumption (4) became a goal; unique, de Grazia asserts, from previous imperial systems established by European nations such as Great Britain and Spain in that it was established to disrupt entrenched European economic buying patterns of class distinction, local production, and long-established market events. The Leipzig Fair, for example, had been a 700-year-old tradition, which waned in popularity during the middle of the twentieth century as American consumer goods flooded Europe. What was once a showcase for local products became marginalized as consumers could buy items cheaper and closer to home, an American characteristic. …

Managing Work and Family

Dual-earner families in the United States and Europe struggle to balance the demands of work and family. These three books document these conflicts and, at times, propose solutions. They use quantitative and qualitative data to illuminate the demands and policies that should or could provide needed supports. They also inform theories relevant to work and family that are contemporary and more traditional. Data come from the United States, Great Britain, and Spain, thus adding a welcome comparative element to the evidence and perspectives in this area of scholarship.

The Struggle for EUrope

Constitutions are often born out of tumultuous moments—after a war or in a moment of collective reconciliation. By contrast, the European Constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters last spring sought to translate half a century of peace into a formal political settlement. Although proponents of the constitution, especially within the European left, were dismayed by the No votes, some of them believe that it is possible to turn the rejection into an opportunity both for the left and for the European Union project as a whole.

Implementation of research-based UK regulations for public transport vehicles with particular reference to contrast in bus and rail vehicles

A recent report on travel and accessibility suggested that as many as 25% of all passengers across Europe struggle when travelling by train. It also goes on to highlight the need for colour, lighting and design to play a major role in creating socially inclusive environments. The Regulatory Requirements for new rail and bus vehicles introduced under Part 5 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), include specifications for the benefit of people with a sensory impairment. National and International research played a major role in determining the specifications. Amongst these unique requirements are specifications for:–Proper contrast to critical surfaces and features such as handrails, controls and doors–Tactile information on features such as controls–Audio warning of automatic door closure–Audio and visual travel information–Provision of priority seats including seats with space for assistance dogsPublic transport is the glue which binds an accessible environment together. Without it people cannot easily get to work or social activities outside the immediate vicinity of their homes. Credible research has a key role to play in underpinning current and future regulations and guidance to further improve the quality of life for disabled people and enable them to participate fully in society.

Contemporary struggle in Europe: ‘Anti-power’ or counter-power?

As soon as you abandon the idea of the state merely as an institution, as a function, and begin to recognise it as a form of social relations, a completely new way of struggle opens up. It is possible to see many courses of action that cart challenge the form of the state's processes whilst we stay within the state. That is the point: such actions cannot be taken from outside the state, only from within. (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group [LEWRG] 1980: 77) To struggle through the state is to become involved in the active process of defeating yourself (Holloway, 2002: 214). Much has happened in the decades spanning these two quotations. The collapse of state socialism has demonstrated the contradictions of seizing state power, and the retreat of social democracy has reinforced the limits of reformism. The pervasive pessimism of postmodernism has been challenged recently by an optimism based on the wave of struggles that began with the Zapatistas' rebellion in Chiapas. The utopian hope that 'another world is possible' articulated by the anti-capitalist movement has not, however, been accompanied by a realistic strategy for its achievement. It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a need to reconstruct the links between academics and activists in order to produce insights into the ways in which everyday struggles intersect with capitalist power. The work of John Holloway contributed to significant conceptual advances in our understanding of social form and everyday struggle in the debate that dominated the CSE, and the pages of Capital & Class, during the late-1970s and the early 1980s. To what extent, however, does Change the World Without Taking Power contribute to our under-standing of social form and everyday struggle in the twenty-first century? The earlier debates highlighted the extent to which capitalist power is embedded in the processes of abstraction that constitute the totality of the capital relation. The fetished and 'thing-like' appearance of money and the state is not illusory, but expresses the reality of how social relations are mediated within a capitalist social order. The social forms of capital are thus both the object and the result of class struggle: the imposition and refusal of bourgeois forms of domination. The contradictory determination of the state provided the space for an oppositional politics that overcame the fetished categories of 'worker', 'client', 'patient', etc. The CSE was an effective vehicle for translating this theory into a form that was practically useful for state workers, council tenants and claimants, engaged in everyday struggles in and against the state. In Change the World, Holloway suggests that, today, such a politics would be 'self-defeating', owing to the ways in which the purity of oppositional struggle would be corrupted by the power relations of capital. He suggests that what is now required is a politics of 'autonomy' and 'anti-power', in order to articulate a negative 'scream of refusal'. We would like to highlight several theoretical and practical difficulties with this proposition, in the context of examples of everyday struggle in contemporary Europe. The main theoretical problem is that there exists an inconsistency between the more abstract model of the state developed by Holloway, and the way in which Holloway presented the state as an object of everyday struggle. This inconsistency contributes to Holloway's rejection of contemporary struggles focused on the state, and to a flawed understanding of the anti-capitalist movement. In Holloway's earlier work, there is an inconsistency between the proposition that the state is an expression of the crisis of the capital relation expressed in a political form (Holloway & Picciotto, 1991: 133), and Holloway's tendency to separate the state as an 'apparatus' and the state as a 'social relation', when discussing everyday struggle (Holloway, 1991: 248). …

The Origins of al Qaeda’s Ideology: Implications for US Strategy

fight against the enemy nearest to you has precedence over the fight against the enemy farther away.... In all Muslim countries the enemy has the reins of power. The enemy is the present rulers. --Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, tried and hanged in connection with the 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat (1) Victory for the Islamic movements ... cannot be attained unless these movements possess an Islamic base in the heart of the Arab region. --Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden deputy, 2001 (2) do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia.... The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize. We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic --Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute, 2002 (3) The leader of Sadat's assassins, Bin Laden's chief ideologue, and a leading American neoconservative supporter of Israel all call for a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East. However, the United States, the existing Arab regimes, and the traditional Sunni clerical establishments all share an interest in avoiding instability and revolution. This shared interest makes the establishments in the Sunni world America's natural partners in the struggle against al Qaeda and similar movements. If American strategists fail to understand and exploit the divide between the establishments and the revolutionaries within Sunni Islam, the United States will play into the radicals' hands, and turn fence-sitting Sunnis into enemies. Outsiders of the Sunni World Sunni is a very big tent, and there always have been insiders and outsiders within Sunnism playing out their rivalries with clashing philosophies. (4) Throughout the past century, the most important of these clashes have occurred between Sunni reformers and the traditional Sunni clerical establishment. The ideology espoused today by al Qaeda and similar groups can be traced directly from the 19th-century founders of modernist reform in Sunnism. Al Qaeda's leading thinkers are steeped in these reformers' long struggle against the establishment. The teaching of the reformers has been heterodox and revolutionary from the beginning; that is, the reformers and their intellectual descendants in al Qaeda are the outsiders of today's Sunni world. For the most part this struggle has been waged in Egypt, Sunni Islam's center of gravity. On one side of the debate, there is Cairo's Al-Azhar, a seminary and university that has been the center of Sunni orthodoxy for a thousand years. On the other side, al Qaeda's ideology has its origins in late-19th-century efforts in Egypt to reform and modernize faith and society. As the 20th century progressed, the Sunni establishment centered on Al-Azhar came to view the modernist reform movement as more and more heterodox. It became known as Salafism, for the supposedly uncorrupted early Muslim predecessors (salaf, plural aslaf) of today's Islam. The more revolutionary tendencies in this Salafist reform movement constitute the core of today's challenge to the Sunni establishment, and are the chief font of al Qaeda's ideology. A Century of Reformation In contemporary Western discussions of the Muslim world, it is common to hear calls for a in Islam as an antidote to al Qaeda. (5) These calls often betray a misunderstanding of both Sunni and of the early modern debate between Catholics and Protestants. In fact, a Sunni reformation has been under way for more than a century, and it works against Western security interests. The Catholic-Protestant struggle in Europe weakened traditional religious authorities' control over the definition of doctrine, emphasized scripture over tradition, idealized an allegedly uncorrupted primitive religious community, and simplified theology and rites. The Salafist movement in the Sunni Muslim world has been pursuing these same reforms for a century. …

Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950

Founded in 1974, the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) aims to publish Canadian research and scholarship in the field of communication studies. The purview of the journal is the entire field of communication studies as practiced in Canada or with relevance to Canada.

Biologically degradable oils at working with power saws

Power saws require a relatively large amount of oil for their operation the reason being idle lubrication of the cutting chain. Oil leakages in the environment can result in soil and water contamination and are known to impact both flora and fauna. Many countries in Europe struggle to minimize the damage by imposing the use of biologically degradable oils for these purposes. The work presents an assessment of these biologically degradable oils from the viewpoint of their possible occurrence in environment and from the viewpoint of their technical characteristics which affect reliability and economy of working with power saws. Oil dispersion is evaluated especially from the viewpoint of the concentration of its occurrence on the soil surface after cutting with the power saw. Technical properties evaluated include heat-oxidation stability and pumping properties of oils at low temperatures. There are original methods of measurement developed for these purposes, which facilitate high repeatability of results. The effort aims at oils with core technical parameters at least comparable with mineral oils used so far, which would represent a lesser burden on natural environment.

Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859

Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859

"The Child of a Fierce Hour": Shelley and Napoleon Bonaparte

IN SHELLEY: THE PURSUIT, RICHARD HOLMES DISCUSSES A DIFFICULT August 1815 letter from Percy Shelley to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. (1) Holmes finds this letter because Shelley's remarks on the final denouement of the Napoleonic struggle in Europe appear to him to be distanced to the point of indifference (290). Shelley's letter refers to newspaper reports describing the continuance of Allied enormities in post-Restoration France, and then goes on to say that: In considering the events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical. This is difficult. Spite of ourselves the human beings which surround us infect us with their opinions; so much as to forbid us to be observers of the questions arising out of the events of the age. (2) Holmes's seminal challenge to the Arnoldian and New Critical view of Shelley evidently influences his reading of this passage. Even so, it is not immediately obvious why it should be difficult to believe that these were the words of a radical aged 23 (290). Rather, Shelley's concern to remain a dispassionate observer of political events, and attendant anxiety about intellectually infectious public opinion, is entirely consistent with the Godwinian mainstream of his thought. (3) What really is extraordinary about this letter, however, is the fact that it marks one of only two ad hominem engagements with in Shelley's extant correspondence, the other being a December 1812 letter to Hogg (Letters 1: 345-54; Holmes 292). This is not, of course, to suggest that does not feature in Shelley's work. Conversely, he clearly plays an important role in The Triumph of Life (1822), and is the subject of three shorter poems: To the Emperors of Russia and Austria ... (1810), Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte (1815), and Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon (1821). (4) He also appears in passing in Shelley's Ode to Liberty (1820), and Philosophical View of Reform (1819), and is at least implicitly present in the Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills (1818). However, very little scholarly attention has been paid to Shelley's engagement with and there is, I think, a critical perception that he didn't have a great deal to say on the subject, at least not when compared to contemporaries like Wordsworth, Southey, Hazlitt, and Byron. Tellingly, the only full-length study of Romanticism's relationship with Napoleon--Simon Bainbridge's and English Romanticism (1995)--makes virtually no mention of Shelley. Seeking to redress this lack of critical attention, the present piece identifies an engagement with as a sustained and important feature of Shelley's work. Intensely concerned with understanding the disastrous course of the French Revolution--the master theme of the epoch in which we live--Shelley's thought needed, necessarily, to take account of (Letters 1: 504). In and English Romanticism, Simon Bainbridge traces a broad pattern of disillusionment and concern in Britain as the erstwhile defender of the French Revolution against foreign aggression becomes an Imperial aggressor himself. Napoleon, as Bainbridge demonstrates, provided early nineteenth-century British culture with an obvious and potent focus for libertarian disenchantment, conservative reaction, and cross-party national(ist) anxiety. Writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bainbridge suggests, drawing on now-familiar arguments about Romanticism's relationship with history, sought to define their own poetic role in opposition to Napoleon's increasingly expansionist politics. Conversely, writers on the other side of the divide--Byron and Hazlitt in particular--continued not only to valorize in order to attack the increasingly conservative establishment, but also to point up their own opposition to the literary organs of that establishment by describing themselves in Napoleonic terms. …

The Silent Witness of Montrelais

The writing of Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation is set against the background of the complex political situation of Europe in the early 16th century. In this survey, the internal European power struggles are explored and the external Muslim threat is discussed. Using the stained-glass east window within the church of Montrelais, France, as an illustration, the author examines the detailed commentary provided by this primary source evidence, installed within the building in 1535. The exploration includes the political and theological elements present in the work, along with the compositional significance of its artistic design. An appreciation is made of this remarkable window about the times of tribulation its construction witnessed, with its depictions of François I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and Henry VIII.

Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950

Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950

Global Hollywood and the Politics of Nationality

Book reviewed: John Trumpbour. Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950.

The Battle of Normandy 1944 (review)

Arguments about the conduct of the Normandy campaign began while it was going on—most notably in Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder's relentless criticism of Montgomery's handling of the battle. That discussion went public shortly after the war's end, with a book by Eisenhower's former aide Harry Butcher (1946), followed by Chester Wilmot's enormously influential [End Page 978] The Struggle for Europe (1948). It is still going on, with Robin Neillands's book one of the most recent entries. Neillands is a prolific writer of very readable military history for the general public, who are the target audience for this book. His aim is "to be even handed about the Normandy campaign"(p. 24). Specialist historians—and most of the readers of this journal will qualify—will find no new archival evidence, nor detailed monographic dissection of either the campaign or its most controversial episodes, like "Goodwood" and the (non)closure of the Falaise pocket. The question for readers of JMH would, therefore, seem to be: can this book be commended as introductory reading either to a curious undergraduate or to what libraries call general readership? Does the author deliver on his promise of a balanced account, based on existing secondary sources (albeit enlivened by veterans' memories—some of them set down at a rather late date)? This reviewer's answer is yes—with a few caveats. Neillands writes clearly and there are enough sketch maps to orient the general reader. His opinions on many issues seem perfectly reasonable. "Normandy was an Allied battle and the victory was an Allied victory" (p. 404) might seem almost a truism but for the erosion of the Anglo-Canadian role in some recent accounts of the campaign, a development that seems to have motivated the writing of this book. At the center of many of the arguments about the Normandy campaign is the still (and perhaps forever) controversial figure of Bernard Law Montgomery. Here again, Neillands seems on target: Monty was a badly flawed human being, but a competent general, and—as A. J. P. Taylor suggested nearly forty years ago—needs to be judged by the results he produced as a general. One of the questions raised, repeatedly, by that approach is the nature and quality of the force Monty commanded, especially the British Second Army. Neillands seems to accept that the "tired army" thesis has some validity, but rejects vigorously the argument that British and Canadian units bore less than their fair share of both combat and casualties. There is more than a hint of (understandable) anger in his treatment of this issue. His conclusion—"in real terms there is nothing much to choose between the performance of the various Allied armies in Normandy"—seems fair and well argued.