The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

Science,gender and moral ascendancy in liberal Italy

Following Italian unification ‘progressive’ physicians, jurists, and criminal sociologists, who constituted a sizeable if particular school of anticlericalism, adopted organic explanations separating responsible from pathological citizens. Positivist criminology enabled the conflation of sexual with political turbulence, of women with peasants and workers, of feminine deficiencies with Mezzogiorno underdevelopment. A secular, literate minority succeeded in resurrecting hierarchies grounded in gender, class and regional differences, and it did so without invoking the moral authority of the Catholic Church.     

On the current absence and future improbability of political Catholicism in Italy

Clerical ‘non-negotiable values’ were actively promoted by right-wing governments in the 2000s, the Monti government that replaced them was strongly supported by the Vatican and the Italian bishops, and the current left-wing government is led by a former member of the Catholic popolari who attends Mass every Sunday. But this article argues that, rather than a new golden age of political Catholicism, the return of Catholicism to Italian politics has taken a ‘low intensity’ form which lacks the robust combination of ideas, leaders, organizations, and interests that informed earlier, genuinely political forms of Catholic engagement. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the ‘Todi movement’, which played a crucial role in the Monti government, and on Matteo Renzi’s current leadership of the Partito democratico and the national government. It also proposes a theoretical framework to explain the apparent contradiction between the high visibility and the low political relevance of Catholicism in Italian politics.     

New and old in the southern question

The southern question has been posed at the key moments in the history of the Italian state. Today we face a moment of comparable importance which urges that the southern question be re‐thought. It is not an unchanging question, yet it concerns issues fundamental to the state and has been treated by the country's greatest intellectuals as a national issue. The meridionalisti have been Italy's critical conscience yet, at the same time, stereotypes of a uniformly backward South have taken hold. The post‐war intervention in the Mezzogiorno should not be seen through such stereotypes as a wholly negative experience. Its successes and failures fit into an Italian pattern of state‐led modernization and it cannot be understood in isolation from the Italian state's weaknesses. Today, a new pact between the weakest and strongest sectors is essential. The South's economic and political leadership will be a central object of study if intellectuals are to help inform new policy.     

Postwar development in the Italian Mezzogiorno. Analyses and policies

Abstract

As Manlio Rossi-Doria wrote, in the early postwar years, the Southern Question was primarily an agrarian one. The debate and policies that addressed the Southern Question, however, did not remain confined solely to the agrarian dimension. The transformation of Southern agriculture was inextricably connected to two additional features of the Italian Mezzogiorno: first, the huge demographic expansion, and second, the lack of an industrial sector able to absorb the excessive agrarian population and to lead a process of economic diversification and internationalization. Above all, the solution to the Southern Question was interpreted as a truly national task. The development of the Mezzogiorno was at the basis of the collaboration between Italy and the World Bank throughout the 1950s. That experience became the subject of an intense debate over development policies that went beyond the Italian borders and embraced the question of postwar development worldwide. The Italian experience turned eventually out to be a failure. One feature of that experience remained vital, though, and has been underscored by contemporary scholars: the solution to the Southern Question is to be found at the national level, not just regionally.     

North and south in the current crisis

The Italian Minister for Territorial Cohesion, Carlo Trigilia, reviews the current condition of the Italian south (the Mezzogiorno) and sets out the policies that the present government is seeking to implement. Underlining the need for long-term strategies and for close cooperation with European Union funding agencies, the Minister emphasizes the need to remove the political and institutional obstacles to development and promote human capital through measures designed to improve training, education and welfare programmes. He concludes the lack of economic growth in the southern regions poses serious dangers to the growth prospects of the national economy.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.     

The University of South Africa (Unisa) 1918–1948: the first transition,from colonial to segregationist institution

This article traces the first of what would become several significant transitions in the evolution of the University of South Africa (Unisa); that from University of the Cape of Good Hope (UCGH), an institution with a distinct English tradition loosely based on the ‘liberal’ constitution of the Cape Colony, to a more segregationist Afrikaner-dominated university by 1946. This was largely shaped by national politics, in particular the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, in the 1920s and 30s. Not only did Unisa become captive to Afrikaner forces, it also was strongly infiltrated by the Broederbond, which had as one of its objectives the holding of key positions in higher education in South Africa. In addition, issues of race now became a growing ‘problem’ as Unisa sought to fulfil its mandate to provide higher education for ‘non-Europeans’ in an era of segregation. However, it would be a distortion to portray this transition fom a simple binary perspective. There was ambivalence about the ‘liberalism’ of the UCGH that reflected the pressures for a new racial order at the Cape. Similarly, the extent of Broederbond influence at Unisa (and over national politics) should not be over-emphasised. Somewhat paradoxically, Unisa continued to accommodate nodes of liberal thinking within the institution, and in the 1960s resisted state attempts to be drawn into a scheme to construct an Afrikaans-only university in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, the essential conservatism and political acquiescence of the university to apartheid meant that the requirement to transform Unisa in the democratic era was all the more painful and complex.     

Nudging Bentham: indirect legislation and (neo-)liberal politics

SUMMARY

The debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and carefully considered mode of indirect legislation, and the authors are right to join Bentham in pointing out that the landscape they seek to improve is always with us; we are always already governed and governing others, and we might as well govern and be governed better than we do/are. On the other hand, nudge-like innovations reveal the extent to which Bentham’s insights have been captured by a disciplinary orientation that removes its subjects from political space. Put differently, the issue with this kind of government is not that it interferes with our liberty so much as that it presumes our lack of political orientation and efficacy. Bentham’s liberal subjects inhabit a public and even republican space that Sunstein and Thaler’s neo-liberal subjects have long since abandoned.     

‘Westward on the high-hilled plains’: the literature of Shropshire and the early twentieth century imagination, 1896–c.1939

This article explores English national identities in the early twentieth century through the regional case study of Shropshire. Building on existing research on English regions, this article addresses the scarcity of border case studies. I argue that Shropshire was perceived as a border region that, at the same time as being incorporated into the model of the South Country, was also powerfully shaped by its proximity to Wales. Shropshire was valued as an escape from commercial modernity through its countryside landscapes, as a gateway to the past through its buildings, place-names, and folk customs, as a borderland of medieval conflict with Wales, and as a mysterious region of superstitions and the supernatural. This article suggests that the motifs and themes which worked through the images of ‘Shropshire’ and ‘England’ supported an imagination of diversity, multiplicity and contradiction—not solely one of national unity.     

Early Lithuanian nationalism: sources of its legitimate meanings in an environment of shifting boundaries

The objective of this article is to formulate the problem of modernity of the nation more specifically with reference to early Lithuanian nationalism. The problem is to find out how national solidarity emerges in the modernising social context in which factors reflecting nationally relevant conflicts of group interests are more valid. The argument, to summarise, is that the decisive phase of Lithuanian nationalism came with the external religious conflict, on the one hand, and the secular liberal movement, on the other. The analysis also explains why early Lithuanian nationalism was of the ‘belated’ type. It was the interaction of ethno–religious factors, socio–economic interests and the rapidly increasing role of the intelligentsia that reinforced the symbolic relations of language and social solidarity.     

A neglected chapter in Italy's transition from Fascism to the Republic: The Kingdom of the South (1943–1944)

Gallerano's paper examines the reasons why Italian historians have paid little attention to the political events that followed the liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno and the brief life of the government established under the auspices of the monarchy during the period of what was termed the Kingdom of the South. He argues that this neglect derives in part from the brevity of the period of civil government in the south, but mainly from the fact that historians have been attracted above all by the history of the Resistance which has led them to consider events in the south to be of secondary importance. Gallerano argues that such a view is quite unjustified and shows how some historians ‐ from Chabod in the early 1950s ‐ have understood that events in the south bore very directly on the broader transition from Fascism to the Republic. Challenging Renzo De Felice's recent claims that Italy's defeat on 8 September 1943 marked the beginning of a crisis of national identity, Gallerano argues that the circumstances that obtained in the months that followed made the south an exceptionally rich terrain for exploring the very contradictory feelings and expectations that were aroused in Italy by the experience of military defeat and political reconstruction.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

民族英雄的尺度：《白话本国史》教科书案研究

1935年,国民党上海市党部以吕思勉《白话本国史》"丑诋岳飞,推崇秦桧"为由而责令修改;有人以此控告商务印书馆与吕思勉,法院决定不起诉。《白话本国史》中的岳飞叙述,不利于在民族危机中激发民族意识来抵抗日本侵略;但其中反军阀思想,有利于国民党加强中央权力,又为南京政府所需要。该案的处理方式反映了国民党政府对民族英雄叙述的尺度:尊崇岳飞为民族英雄,突出其反抗外族侵略的一面,希望借助其抗金形象来振发国民志气;同时把岳飞叙述限制于抗金事迹中,弱化其武将身份,警惕其对军阀政治的影响,以加强国家统一。     

On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine's Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine's Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated or mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve's implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non‐liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics.     

The changing role of the FIRB and the politics of foreign investment in Australia

ABSTRACT

Australia’s policy on foreign investment aims to achieve both the liberal goal of maximising capital inflows and the statist one of ensuring that those inflows are in ‘the national interest’. This article analyses the tensions between these goals through interviews with policymakers who have direct knowledge of the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), which has functioned as an ‘offstage’, pre-market regulator for capital inflows to Australia. The tensions between these policy goals were manageable because the FIRB exercised its powers rarely, decisively and quietly, and the government believed that foreign investment did not threaten the national interest. The emergence of state-owned enterprises as foreign investors, however, significantly altered this calculus, and the FIRB has been tasked with assessing the national security implications of proposed investments. Instead of working offstage, as in earlier decades, the FIRB has become central to debates about how Australia should respond to the rise of China.     

Die ‘Krüppelfürsorge’ in der Weimarer Republik. Zwischen eigenem Standpunkt und diskursiver Anschlussfähigkeit an eugenische Argumentationsstrukturen

The ‘Krüppelfürsorge’ during the Weimar Republic. Oscillating between an Own Position and the Adoption of Eugenic Arguments. This article examines the discourse about physical disability led by the German ‘Krüppelfürsor‐ge’. It deals with the exhibition GeSoLei (Gesundheitspflege, soziale Fürsorge and Leibesübungen), which took place in Düsseldorf in 1926. The GeSoLei was one of the most popular platforms of the healthy and aesthetic body in the 1920s. It stood in the context of the German ‘national recovery’ after World War I and collected all types of medical, social and athletic professionals to expose their work to a broader audience. Also representatives of the so called ‘Krüppelfürsorge’ presented themselves and at the same time their perspective on people with physical disabilities on this exhibition. The article points out the ambivalent character of their perspective and shows the mixture of including and excluding people with physical disabilities, which was typical for the view of the ‘Krüppelfürsorge’. It demonstrates that the ‘Krüppelfürsorger’ on the one hand were quite progressive towards people with disabilities, but on the other hand showed a striking openness towards eugenic values.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Fighting for Trieste: nationalism and political violence at the edge of the Iron Curtain

Between 1945 and 1954, the Italian and Yugoslav governments staunchly disputed national sovereignty of Trieste and northern Istria. Although scholars have extensively studied the diplomatic dimension of what became known as the ‘Trieste question’, only a few have devoted attention to the Italian government’s aggressive strategy toward the city from 1945 to 1954. This article examines the Italian politics of nationalism in Cold War Trieste by investigating the interactions between the central government, the Allied authorities and the local political forces that either supported or opposed Italian territorial claims toward the city. Based upon the study of Italian as well as Allied governmental records, state-led propaganda and public press, this article suggests that the central government not only tolerated but also encouraged phenomena of local political violence to oppose the Communist threat and defy Allied occupation. This study ultimately proves the residual strength of nationalism as a political ideology and further elucidates the undisclosed relationship between right-wing movements and the central government during the early years of the Cold War.     

From the bottom of the bottle: justice,prison and social control in the Italian transition

The ‘conflict between politics and justice’ has been a central feature of the Italian ‘transition’ for reasons that touch on the essence of the so-called Second Republic. Apparently dominating the political agenda, it also functioned as a cover for a resurgence of coercive forms of social control in Italy. In response to the social transformations taking place throughout the western world, from the late 1980s the Italian prison system had been expanding and was used to target social marginal groups, especially foreigners and drug addicts. This paper examines how these changes took place, the juridical measures that gave rise to them and their political motivations in the period from the crisis of the First Republic to the declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ in the prison system which (at least for now) seems to have brought to a close the openly populist use of the criminal justice system.