Transnational Discourses Research Articles

Bushman or Boer – Australian Identity in a ‘White Man’s War’, 1899–1902

This article considers Australian articulations of identity and representations of Boer soldiers in the South African War. Examining accounts from Australian war correspondents and military personnel, we make three observations. First, that widespread expressions of British Empire loyalty shaped rather than excluded expressions of nascent Australian nationalism. Second, that emergent Australian nationalism, particularly the notion of the ‘bushman’, was central to positive and negative comparisons to Boer soldiers. Finally, that transnational discourses of settler colonialism and whiteness enabled such comparisons, which simultaneously facilitated claims about Australian martial superiority and deceptive Boer indolence, despite noted similarities between bushman and Boer.

Historical perspectives and contemporary challenges to education (Bildung) and citizenry in the modern nation state: Comparative perspectives on Germany and the USA

In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of public education in Germany and the US, focusing on historical and contemporary challenges to education, Bildung, and citizenry in the modern nation state. In particular, we examine relations among nation building processes and education, transnational discourses, mutual influences, and relations regarding public education over time, and identity building and citizenship within and between federal, nation state and international levels. Comparative methods are utilized to examine policy documents as well as the literature, looking for similarities and differences among key concepts and discourses. The article concludes by pointing out that a number of contemporary developments bringing public education to a crossroads today are not entirely new and that foundations of education theory are still relevant. At the same time, we suggest new cross-national dialogues regarding the challenges bringing public education to the crossroads today.

Exploration, Celebrity, and the Making of a Transnational Hero: Fridtjof Nansen and the Fram Expedition

The article examines why the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen’s Arctic expedition on board Fram (1893–96) generated so much attention across Europe and America. The article analyzes previously unused manuscripts, geographical society journals, and print culture to show how Fram’s story traveled through three related networks: as a set of commercial products circulated through an expanding global market for commodities and media spectacle; as a set of scientific products circulated through an increasingly institutionalized network of universities, learned societies, and international congresses; and as a set of symbolic goods projected to the public through state networks via ceremonies and monuments. Section I outlines the origins of the expedition in the campaign for Norwegian independence, before Section II analyzes how geographical societies showered Nansen with awards. Speakers expressed a transnational discourse of heroic exploration and celebrated a scientific quest in the service of humanity, but ceremonies consistently positioned Nansen’s achievement to honor individual nation-states. Sections III and IV reconstruct the commodification of the expedition, revealing for the first time the full scale of Nansen’s lecture tours. Expeditions were engines of novelty, manufacturing new visions of heroic masculinity for sale in a global marketplace. Section V shows how publications across Europe and America deployed similar textual and visual strategies to project Nansen, his wife Eva, and daughter Liv through the optic of celebrity, manufacturing emotional bonds with audiences. By charting the circulation of products through entangled commercial, scientific, and state networks, the article explains the global reach of Fram’s story.

“We shall be the Mother of Jesus.” Visions of power among radical religious women in northern Europe, 1690–1760

ABSTRACT This article examines the radical Protestant movements in England, the Holy Roman Empire, and the twin kingdom of Denmark and Norway from the turbulent 1690s to the 1760s. It argues that, in contrast to the intellectual environments of radical Enlightenment, it was easier for women to assert themselves within radical Protestant movements, such as the Quakers, the Philadelphians, and the radical Pietist and Moravian communities. Within these radical movements, it was possible for women to create a space in which they could express themselves as prophets. Among these groups were some women who achieved quite prominent positions, such as Jane Lead in London, Johanna Eleonora Petersen in Magdeburg, and Marie Wulf in Copenhagen. Furthermore, the article discusses how these movements created new religious discourses that challenged traditional gender boundaries and social hierarchies. Some radical Protestants emphasized that there were feminine attributes of Christianity, whereas others allegedly prophesied that in the future millennium, women would achieve a special status as the mothers of Jesus and as co-regents. Prophecies constituted a shared transnational discourse within radical Protestantism through which traditional gender roles were negotiated and could sometimes even be revoked.

Styling Blackness in Chile: Music and Dance in the African Diaspora by Juan Eduardo Wolf

Reviewed by: Styling Blackness in Chile: Music and Dance in the African Diaspora by Juan Eduardo Wolf Francisco D. Lara Styling Blackness in Chile: Music and Dance in the African Diaspora. By Juan Eduardo Wolf. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xi, 241 p. ISBN 9780253041135 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9780253041142 (paperback), $32; ISBN 9780253041159 (e-book), $18.99.] Notes, bibliography, index. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf presents a snapshot of an emerging and continually transformative process of racial and ethnic identification and representation through music and dance among people of African descent in Arica, Chile. Wolf, a Chilean American musician and ethnomusicologist, explores this process through an ethnography that delicately situates his observations and experiences in Arica between 2002 and 2016 in relation to participant interviews, ethnographic vignettes, and historical contextualization. What he finds is a complex and often contradictory account of the origins, historical trajectories, and ways in which Black and non-Black Chileans in Arica identify with the music and dance traditions discussed, including the tumbe carnaval, vals criollo, morenada, and caporales, among others. Through discourse analysis and various academic theories relating to music and identity, Wolf does an excellent job of painting a broad portrait of a process in continual dialogue and transformation. While doing so, he substantially documents the origins and development of specific genres like tumbe carnaval and the role that Afrodescendant cultural organizations and individuals like Oro Negro and Gustavo del Canto played in reviving certain Afro-descendant musical traditions and in styling Blackness through music and dance in Arica. Overall, it is a welcome and much needed addition to the growing academic literature on the part of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists on music, dance, and identity in Afro-Latin America and the greater African diaspora. The overall focus of Wolf's research is the music-dance genre known as tumbe carnaval. A tradition once practiced in Arica among the region's Black community in the early part of the twentieth century, Wolf documents how this genre was revived and reinterpreted by Black and non-Black community leaders and Afro-descendant cultural organizations in the early 2000s, specifically Oro Negro, Lumbanga, Arica Negro, Sabor Moreno, as well as the Salgado family in Arica, and Santiago native and journalist Gustavo del Canto, to name a few. This conscious revival was based on the memory of Black elders who recalled watching and listening to their own grandparents perform and dance what was then known as tumba during Carnival season. Fragments of rhythm, melody, lyrics, dance moves, and instrumentation recalled of the earlier tumba were used as the basis for the modern day tumbe carnaval. The process of developing [End Page 215] the reinterpreted tumbe carnaval over the span of the fourteen years detailed by Wolf placed the genre in dialogue with other music-dance genres, musical instruments, and rhythms heard and performed throughout the African diaspora, including Afro-Peruvian, Afro-Uruguayan, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Caribbean music-dance genres and rhythms. As Wolf illustrates, this dialogue references an emerging national and transnational discourse on Blackness in Chile and greater Latin America and the African diaspora. This discourse is linked to issues of social and racial equity, land rights, and politics in Chile as elsewhere. Wolf notes how the formation of Oro Negro and the desire to revive tumba were conscious decisions among members of the cultural organization inspired by transnational discussions of racial equity linked to a sense of Blackness within the African diaspora. At the same time, it was also clear, as Wolf details, that this decision was intended to strengthen and foment a sense of local Black identity expressed through music and dance for the purposes of engaging in a broader national discussion on national identity conceived in terms of multiculturalism. Doing so would help to bolster awareness of Black Chilean history, culture, and issues and would also contribute to challenging racism and meeting the social and political needs and agendas of Chile's Black population. Wolf is careful to note the limits of this present discourse and project, however, for challenging and overcoming racial stereotypes as they relate to music and dance. Complicating the question of Black identity in relation to national...

Global Tashkent: Transnational Visions of a Soviet City in the Postcolonial World, 1953–1966

SUMMARY:In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet city of Tashkent emerged as a showcase of socialism for the Third World. Scores of visitors traveled to the city from decolonizing countries, encountering Soviet presentations of the city's advanced modernity and authentic Asian culture. This article focuses on accounts of Tashkent produced by these visitors, suggesting they be understood as a coherent transnational discourse. Examining travelogues by Indian observers in the 1950s, as well as accounts of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference of 1958 and the Indo-Pakistani Peace Conference of 1966, it argues that Tashkent served as a site to engage with the project of the Third World, especially the problems of non-European modernity and postcolonial solidarity therein. Accounts of the city reflected both the hopes and tensions of Third Worldism in the Eurocentric world of the Cold War.Резюме:В 1950–1960-х гг. Ташкент стал витриной социализма для стран Третьего мира. Десятки иностранных гостей города из деколонизирующихся стран столкнулись здесь с советскими представлениями о модерности и аутентичной азиатской культуре. Исследуя травелоги индийских интеллектуалов 1950-х гг., а также отчеты о Ташкентской конференции писателей стран Азии и Африки (1958) и Ташкентской конференции по урегулированию Индо-Пакистанского конфликта (1966), статья показывает, что Ташкент был локусом советской вовлеченности в проект Третьего мира, особенно в том, что касалось проблем неевропейской модерности и постколониальной солидарности. Ташкентские травелоги отражали надежды идеологов Третьего мира и фрустрацию, которую они испытывали в европоцентричном интеллектуальном пространстве времен холодной войны.

The transnational discourse of political protests: setting the agenda through social media

This article analyses the role of social media as a transnational discursive space and the impact of networked communication on the formation of the traditional mass media agenda regarding political protests that began in June 2019 in Hong Kong. The aim of the present research was to indicate the degree of impact of the dominant themes in networked communication during the anti-extradition bill protests in the transnational network discourse and the impact on the news media agenda, taking into account the activity of user-generated network traffic around the published content. The research was based on two theories shaping the perception of political protests in an international context - theory on transnational discursive spaces and theories of agenda setting. The research was carried out using quantitative content analysis and confirmed that global social networking sites Facebook and Twitter are important channels in creating transnational discursive spaces that affect the news media's agenda. Findings show that social media plays an important role in organizing political protests, and is a tool for establishing transnational discursive spaces; despite the fact that the protesters used applications protecting their data for communication, with the assistance of information and integrated collaboration by other entities. The results obtained contribute to the research on media studies which highlight the role and importance of social media in the process of communicating about political protests.

The Transnationality of the Secular

Abstract This essay discusses in how far we can understand the evolution of secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 as a result of transimperial and transnational patterns. In the context of the growing comparative literature on the history of secularisms around the globe, I argue for more attention for the mobility of ideas and people across borders. Conceptually, I suggest to capture the diversity of 20th century secularisms in terms of family resemblance and to understand this resemblance less as colonial inheritance but as the result of translocal networks and their circuits of ideas and practices since 1918. I approach these networks through a combination of global intellectual history, the history of transnational social networks, and the global history of non-state institutions. Empirically, I illustrate my argument with three case studies: the reception of Atatürk’s reforms across Asia and the Middle East to illustrate transnational discourses around secularism; the role of social networks in the form of translocal women’s circles in the interwar period; and private US foundations as global circuits of expertise. Together, these illustrations are an attempt to sustain a certain degree of coherence within globalising secularism studies while at the same time avoiding conceptual overstretch.

From Protests to Policies: Actors, Spaces and Processes

This paper addresses a rather understudied aspect of the ways through which protests get translated into policies by focussing on the actors, spaces and processes. It further identifies key actors in the policy making formulation process, which we call ‘policy intermediaries’. It discusses the emergence of ‘policy intermediaries’ in relation to the history of social movements in post-colonial India. It situates the policy making processes in the country and the role of ‘policy intermediaries’ therein, in the overall context of changing configurations of relationships amongst the state, non-governmental organisations, think tanks and the emergent transnational networks and discourses. By implication, it maps out some of the attributes of middle class activism with illustrations from select social movements in India. The paper explores the multiple spaces in which ‘policy intermediaries’ function, the diverse roles they play and the networks in which they are wilfully or otherwise enmeshed.

Women, Sex, and the 1950s Acción Católica’s Campaña Nacional de Moralización del Ambiente

This article examines how some Catholic women, through their participation in an Acción Católica campaign, protested what they believed was the immoral nature of an expanding consumer culture: the movies, magazines, fashions, and comic books that inundated Mexico—particularly Mexico City—in the 1950s. Through this campaign, these women sought to construct an ideal form of Catholic womanhood that was both modern and moral—one that embraced modesty and sexual purity as a way for Mexico to modernize and progress. While the campaign had its roots in papal directives and was part of transnational discourses about morality, the Mexican women who participated saw their actions, nevertheless, in nationalistic terms. A modern Mexico, they argued, needed to have a strong moral base in order to be economically and politically successful; thus the morality they espoused centered on constraining women’s sexual expression.

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940

Naida García-Crespo's superb study of the confluence of early Puerto Rican cinema and the development of nationalism should interest a wide set of readers in the history of early cinema, Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies, and Latin American intellectual discourse during the early twentieth century. It provides both an excellent historiography of silent and sound films produced on the island before World War II and a treatise on how the idea of the Puerto Rican nation emerged as a “mediation among contradictory discourses” of nativist nationalism and cross-cultural, transnational, and colonial exchanges (p. 170).In her attempt to create something solid out of the otherwise spectral, García-Crespo faced two daunting challenges. On the one hand, only one feature film produced in Puerto Rico before 1940 still exists today—the 1934 Romance Tropical, which García-Crespo informs us is preserved in the University of California, Los Angeles, film archive (p. 177n2). On the other, the study of a national cinema usually implies the existence of an actual nation and an actual state; Puerto Rico, of course, transitioned from a colony of Spain to one of the United States during the period under review and remains today, in García-Crespo's term, a “stateless nation” (p. 9).She was able to overcome the first of these challenges thanks to a solid methodological grounding in the study of early film. Through an exhaustive study of archival and published primary sources—including movie scripts, newspaper and magazine reviews, business documents, government records, and ancestry work—García-Crespo re-creates both the narrative plotlines of several films and the institutional history of the nascent film industry in Puerto Rico. Following a recent trend in early film studies that considers distribution networks, viewership, and exhibition practices to be as important to the development of national cinema as auteurship and film production, she demonstrates that even notable failures produced long-term benefits to the Puerto Rican film industry. Both the Tropical Film Company (based in Ponce between 1916 and 1917) and Porto Rico Photoplays (which built a film studio in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan in the early 1920s) reveal the kinds of transnational partnerships at the heart of Puerto Rican culture.Despite key differences, both of these short-lived production companies symbolize the creative use of transnational analysis that García-Crespo employs to overcome the second challenge mentioned above. The Tropical Film Company, which was founded by Rafael Colorado D'Assoy (a Spanish-born entrepreneur who first came to the island as a Spanish soldier in the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898) and Nemesio Canales and Luis Lloréns Torres (two elite intellectuals known for their involvement in the nationalist independence movement), deployed cinema as a Progressive Era tool of education and reform. In contrast, Porto Rico Photoplays was a business venture between the American filmmaker F. Eugene Farnsworth (who later became a leader of the Maine chapter of the Ku Klux Klan) and local elites such as San Juan businessman Enrique González Beltrán that sought to attract US capital and talent to the island. Although the Tropical Film Company also had commercial aims, it produced a wide array of narrative and documentary films such as Los funerales de Muñoz Rivera (1916). Porto Rico Photoplays produced just one film, a derivative romance with antimiscegenation themes called Tropical Love (1921).For each example, García-Crespo argues that we cannot read history backwards to see the birth of the Puerto Rican independista movement in the films of the Tropical Film Company or simply condemn the colonial commercialism of Porto Rico Photoplays. Rather, each exemplifies how under colonial contexts “the national and the transnational become so intricately connected . . . that delineation between the two becomes impossible” (p. 8). Each, she argues, demonstrates how ideas about the nation “emanated from both rejecting and embracing different transnational discourses about the island's image and place in the world” (p. 172).The book moves chronologically forward from the first film screenings in Latin America and the Caribbean in the late 1890s to the creation of the New Deal–inspired Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO) by the insular Puerto Rican government in the 1940s. Delightful stories about early Puerto Rican filmmaking (too many to detail here) are matched by astute analyses of how gendered and elite visions of the nation are at the root of both early cinema and the early nationalist project on the island.Readers of the Hispanic American Historical Review, however, might come away wishing that García-Crespo had expanded her analysis through more explicit comparisons with cinematic and nationalistic developments in other parts of Latin America. Despite its somewhat inward-looking approach (common in Puerto Rican studies), the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of early Puerto Rican cinema and culture. Serving as a counterweight to traditional national histories of early cinema, it would make a great addition to syllabi in global film courses as well.

The emergence of the car-oriented city: Entanglements and transfer agents in West-Berlin, East-Berlin and Lyon, 1945–75

It is well known how the planning model of a “car-oriented city” was common among Western experts in the post-Second World War period, but here we claim this approach was common in both sides of divided Berlin. Investigating East- and West-Berlin’s reconstruction, here we analyse the relationship between the transnational sphere of circulation and its local realisations. Focusing on the leading figures of urban planning in West- and East-Berlin (who acted as “transfer agents”, participating in the transnational discourse) let us to better frame Berlin’s urban history in the 1960s and 1970s. The example of Lyon as France’s most “car-friendly city” is included in the analysis, so to transcend traditional perspectives of Cold War-antagonism, as well as to show the diverse and multilateral ways of exchange. Finally, the findings of the article will put the established periodisation of the “car-oriented city” in question.

Women beneath the Surface: Coal and the Colonial State in India during the Second World War

In British India in 1943, a rapidly escalating Allied coal crisis resulted in the lifting of a six-year-old ban on women’s employment underground. Over 70,000 low-caste and adivasi (indigenous) women, battling the war-induced Bengal Famine, sustained production levels and prevented the monthly loss of 385,000 tons of coal between August 1943 and February 1946. Their employment sparked unprecedented outrage among the public, in the press, and in parliaments, generating a transnational discourse on Indian women workers for the very first time. Meanwhile the desperate colonial government disciplined miners through the threat of starvation, information that has so far remained concealed.

‘We Are Here’: the politics of memory in narrating China’s queer feminist history

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of narrating feminist and queer histories in contemporary China. Focusing on Zhao Jing and Shi Tou’s 2015 film, We Are Here, a documentary made to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, I examine how the film represents queer women’s history in China and in what discourses such a representation is situated. Icontend that the processes of remembrance and forgetting are intertwined in narrating queer women’s history in China. Indeed, while the film successfully recovers a hidden queer history, it also risks erasing the history of socialist and Marxist feminism, as well as China’s socialist legacies at large. Isuggest that we should think about Chinese feminist and queer movements in terms of continuities and ruptures by paying attention to their articulations to different transnational discourses at specific historical conjunctures. While We Are Here convincingly addresses the transnational influence from liberal feminism, it is also necessary to call attention to the legacies of socialist and Marxist feminism in China and transnationally in contemporary feminist and queer historiography and mediated memories.

Transnational Identity in Indra Bahadur Rai’s Selected Short Stories

Are the people of Nepali origin who are born in India and live there transnational? This is a piercing question in transnational discourses in Nepal and India these days. But its answer is clear once we take the help of the concept of transnationalism: they are transnational Nepalis living in India. This reality is further clarified with the studies on Indra Bahadur Rai’s short stories. Almost all the characters in his stories are the people of Nepali origin living in Darjeeling. They are unhappy there and always behave like the temporary residents of the place. Most of his stories deal with the life of these people in relation with their search for the origin and related physical and psychological journeys. Even the images, symbols and settings used in the stories connect themselves with the idea of journey and the problems of settlements. This article deals with the same aspects of his collection of stories entitled Pratinidhi Kathaa [Representative Stories]. The stories are analyzed with the help of interpretive methodology and use of Steven Vertovec and Jenine Dahinden’s ideas of transnationalism. John McLeod, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Roland Végső and Winfried Fluck’s ideas of transnational literature are used as the basic concepts in analysis.

Maritime history at maritime museums

All museums do research into their collections. Some maritime museums, however, have started co-operations with adjacent universities and formed research bodies that initiated multidisciplinary research projects, as well as inaugurating PhD programmes and joining the transnational academic discourse. These initiatives are dependent on active promotion by research directors. Once these directors retire, their research initiatives are often jeopardised.

The state-as-parent: reframing parent–child relations in Rwanda

This article attempts to think across and beyond the fields of childhood studies and parenting culture studies by employing postcolonial, relational and temporal lenses to explore child–parent–state relations and how these relations have been constructed, represented and enacted over time. Using the case study of Rwanda, we suggest that the phenomenon of state-as-parent functions symbolically and instrumentally to establish state legitimacy and national unity in the aftermath of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, informed by both the specificities of the Rwandan historical and current contexts, as well as transnational discourses on childhood and parenting. Furthermore, we argue that plural, coexisting and conflicting temporalities are at play in the reframing and reworking of state–parent–child relations, which are also a site for the generation of subaltern forms of temporality to contest the overarching narrative of state-as-parent.

The Mandarins of the Law: Pro Bono Legal Work from a Comparative Perspective

The Mandarins of the LawPro Bono Legal Work from a Comparative Perspective Daniel Bonilla Maldonado (bio) Introduction The right to access to justice is one of the pillars of modern liberal democracies. On the one hand, it allows citizens to solve their conflicts by appealing to courts and to the administration.1 On the other, as argued in the theoretical papers gathered in Part I, it allows citizens to choose and realize their life projects and to be fully included in the political community. Yet, all modern liberal democracies suffer an access to justice deficit to varying degrees. As argued in the introduction of this special issue, class, epistemological and market inequalities create notable obstacles to the materialization of the right to access to justice. Modern liberal democracies have developed four institutions— public defenders’ offices, court-appointed counsel, legal clinics, and pro bono work—to realize the State’s and lawyers’ obligations to securing the right to access to justice for all. This article is focused on only one of these institutions: pro bono legal work. This article pursues two intertwined aims: first, it describes and analyzes the conceptual architecture that supports pro bono work;2 second, using these theoretical tools, it describes and analyzes the pro bono discourse and practices developed in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. [End Page 131] In Part I, I present the elements that form the standard global concept of pro bono work. Pro bono work is a global phenomenon defined by, and based on, a transnational discourse.3 In the first section of Part I, I argue that this transnational discourse conceptualizes pro bono work as a set of institutionalized free legal services that lawyers voluntarily provide to people with few financial resources or to protect the public interest. In the three following sections, I specify and analyze the concepts of subject,4 time,5 and space6 that this understanding of pro bono work creates, to present the categories that structure the discourse on pro bono work and contribute to the creation of part of the modern legal and political imagination. In the final section of Part I, I present and analyze the conceptual oppositions that structure the discourse on pro bono work and contribute to the creation of the concepts of subject, time, and space that support its conceptual apparatus. In Part II, in the first section, I argue that the pro bono discourse and practices in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia are the result of a legal [End Page 132] transplant between the legal mandarins of North and South America. The Argentinian, Chilean, and Colombian legal elites import this set of practices and theories; the US legal elites export them.7 In the second section of Part II, I explore the reasons for the exchange of pro bono knowledge. In the third section, I present and analyze the role that clients and the state have in pro bono, as well as the local interpretations and variations of the transplantation that are emerging. Finally, in the last section, I explain why this knowledge still has not fused into stable institutions and practices in the importing legal communities. This legal transplantation has not taken root in the private spheres of the importing liberal states, and has had a minor impact on the realization of the right of access to justice.8 The two parts of this article intersect. The conceptual architecture of the globalized pro bono legal discourse is fundamentally the same as the concepts that have been promoted by the pro bono foundations of Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. The theoretical analysis is useful for understanding both the standard pro bono discourse already disseminated globally and practiced by Argentinian, Chilean, and Colombian lawyers. This cultural analysis of pro bono work does not occur in the abstract. The differences and similarities among pro bono work in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia; the patterns that the pro bono discourse and practices follow in these three countries; and the specific ways they have contributed to the construction of regional lawyers’ legal consciousness illustrates this cultural analysis. The relationship between theory and practice, therefore, goes both ways. The theoretical and comparative analysis presented in this article is informed...

Patient Centeredness from a Perspective of History of the Present: A Genealogical Analysis

The overall aim of this study, performed in Sweden, was to problematize the contemporary national and transnational discourse on patient centeredness, which during recent decades has become a given, having become established as a dogma in conversations, writing, and thinking about patients and health care. We did that by showing that ideas such as patient centeredness can be seen differently from the way they are depicted in contemporary discourses about health care. In the presented analysis, we drew on Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, ‘history of the present’ and genealogy. This means that we reflected on contemporary conceptions of how phenomena, such as the care seeker, have been constructed within other discourses about health care. Empirically, we used different health policy documents—government reports from three different historical periods. The analysis showed that contemporary narratives about centeredness are neither more, nor less, care seeker-centered than the narratives of yesteryear. Rather, the phenomenon of the care seeker is given different frames and meanings within the framework of different economic and historical discourses about health care. Our analysis raised questions about the contemporary construction of patient centeredness. In a world with such huge economic differences between nations, as well as between citizens within most nations, the contemporary discourse may be limited as it does not problematize structural issues in the same way as previous discourses had done. Perhaps what is needed today are national and international patient-centered or person-centered discourses which also discuss policies and practices that are population- and social group-centered. In the final discussion of the analysis, we identified a new patient-centered discourse, which views the patient as a resource among other resources. The most important limitation of this type of study is that it is only about discourses and policy issues and not about daily practical activities.

Europe of nations, Europe without nationalism

ABSTRACTIn the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, the discussion among authors, philosophers and other intellectuals on the future of Europe took on themes from the inter war period like crisis, decline and nihilism, but they also added new takes. This contextual examination treats a transnational discourse on European cultural unity. As a starting point, it takes the changing framework of the postwar era with on the one hand the early repeating of the crisis-views and on the other hand the Iron wall and communist threat. The article includes four intellectuals from different countries. Among them, Salvador Madariaga and Denis Rougemont were stout Europeanists that opposed the idea of the nationalism already before the war. Also at that time Karl Jaspers and Stephen Spender critiqued their societies but came out as Europeanists only after the Second World War. They met at congresses and paid significant attention to the concept of Europe. I make use of the proceedings from the congress L’esprit européen (1946) and their treaties on Europe from the following years. The article investigates this discourse with a focus on how Jaspers, Madariaga, Rougemont and Spender assessed the intersection of European unity with nation and nationalism.