The Mafia misunderstood – again

Abstract

Observers who have investigated Alleanza Nazionale's relationship to historical fascism have mostly relied on programmatic documents as well as Gianfranco Fini's speeches and interviews. This article tackles the same question by considering the visual propaganda produced by the party from its launch in 1994 to its merger with Silvio Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà in March 2009. An examination of the logos, the portraits of Fini and other imagery that feature on posters, brochures, websites and the party daily Secolo d'Italia shows that they frequently refer, albeit mostly covertly, to the iconographies of fascism. The contemporary visual sources used by Alleanza Nazionale and the strategies adopted to present a modern and respectable image are also explored. The article argues that much of the propaganda of Alleanza Nazionale incorporates two levels of meaning: an overt and moderate one, which addressed the general public, and a concealed one celebrating ideas and values of the Ventennio, which aimed to reassure a hard-core of activists that the party had not betrayed its original identity.     

The Italian political system after the 9 – 10 April 2006 elections

Abstract

All recent Italian elections have produced important electoral consequences. In this brief introduction, the author highlights some of the problems, difficulties and perspectives for the Italian political system following the electoral victory of the centre-left. More precisely, he suggests that there are two complex issues in need of being analyzed and politically tackled: the revisions to be introduced into the Italian Constitution and the transformation of some Italian parties and the reorganization of the party system. In conclusion, at least in this phase, the Italian political system is bound to remain in a situation that can still be defined as an ongoing political and institutional transition.     

The congresses of Italian scientists between Europe and the Risorgimento (1839 – 75)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the history of the Italian scientific congresses from 1839 until 1875. The congresses are analyzed in the context of the political Risorgimento, but also as a reflection of relations among social groups, and between society and institutions. We examine the troubled coexistence of a minority interested primarily in encouraging the professionalization of science in state institutions of learning, and a broader sector of eminent citizens that placed the value of ‘expertise’ alongside the values of birth and social ranking. This complicated coexistence was the chief reason that the Italian congresses failed, and after 1861, as well, in their effort to establish a national scientific association comparable to those existing in many other countries, both inside and outside Europe. This essay reconstructs the main points and phases of the debate and the changes in the relations among the social and professional groups and scientific work, up until the foundation of a Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze (SIPS, Italian Association for the Advancement of Science), which explicitly rejected the heritage of the Risorgimento.     

The Frankish tradition and new perceptions of the monarchy: Louis XV—the new pharamond?

During the last century of the ancien régime in France, perceived notions of history, the rediscovery of the past, and the recourse to tradition were closely linked to each other as well as to political considerations or implications. Notions about the past and interpretations of tradition had relevance and meaning for the political élites, enabling them to explain the origins of the monarchy as well as its nature. The purpose here is to explore these links and to show how, in one particular instance, they came to affect the artistic representation of the monarch himself.     

Foreign Jews in the western Alps (1938 – 43)

Abstract

This article examines the question of policy towards the Jews in the Italian occupied zone of southern France from 1940 to 1943. It develops the argument that in the World War II the Alps constituted a clearly demarcated geographical area that for Jewish refugees from all over Europe promised shelter and safety. A number of ‘exemplary cases’ (for example that of Angelo Donati) as well as an unpublished document relating to the case of ‘residence forcée’ in St Martin Vésubie, provided the opportunity for comparing different interpretations of Italian attitudes towards the Jews in those years.     

The Knife’s Edge of the Present: Archaeology in Turkey from the Nineteenth Century to the 1940s

This paper investigates how archaeology functioned in Turkey from the nineteenth century until the end of the 1940s. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman world, an awareness was raised to acknowledge the power of patrimony. Amidst intense reforms to Westernize the empire, archaeological artifacts were used as a means of Europeanness. The Greek, Roman, and Byzantine pasts of the Ottoman lands were the focus of this era. The foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marked the start of a new project to create a modern nation-state out of a centuries’ old Islamic dynasty. This project rewrote the history of Turkish nation in relation to prehistoric civilizations such as the Hittites and the Sumerians. Archaeology became the primary tool of the Republic to validate the renewed history.     

Allied escapers and the contadini in occupied Italy (1943 – 5) 1

Abstract

The little-known ‘great escape’ of Allied prisoners-of-war (some 50,000) held in Italian camps at the time of the armistice of 8 September 1943 provides the starting-point for a fresh interpretation of popular and peasant experience during the emergency of 1943 – 5. The article explores some of the main aspects of the ‘strange alliance’ between Allied fugitives and the Italian population, with particular attention to the mutual symbolic appropriation between former ‘enemies’ in the midst of a civil war and related collapse of the state.     

Youth aspirations and employment in provincial Indonesia: a view from the lower middle classes

ABSTRACT

Demographically and geographically, lower middle class youth occupy an ambiguous position in Indonesian society, embodying elements of both privilege and marginality. Drawing on interviews and 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2013, this article considers how an emerging provincial middle class seeks to make good on the promises of an expanding higher education system and proliferation of globalised youth cultures. I examine the capacity and limits of higher education in facilitating young people’s aspirations for youth lifestyles, jobs and the future in a regional labour market with high levels of youth underemployment and informality. Young people’s aspirations for employment and middle class standards of living are mitigated by their responsibilities towards their families and difficulties to establish the social connections needed to access jobs and opportunities. Faced with limited upward mobility, class as an aspirational category rather than everyday reality underpins young people’s claims about the good life.     

War in the mental hospitals: sychiatry and clinical files (1940 – 52)

Abstract

Is there a connection between war and madness? How have psychiatrists responded to the problem of those ‘driven mad by war’? This article tries to answer these questions by drawing on clinical records for three Italian psychiatric hospitals in the period from 1940 to 1950. While these problems have been researched and debated for combatants during the World War I, in the case of the World War II, as this article shows, it is necessary to take into account the impact of war not only on soldiers but also on civilians who were equally involved in the trauma of war.     

The 2000 inter-Korean summit: The road to reconciliation?

The inter-Korean summit held in Pyongyang between 13 and 15 June 2000 was an unprecedented event. It was the first time the leaders of North and South have met face to face since the formal partitioning of Korea in 1948. This article examines the main reasons why the 2000 summit occurred, what the summit produced, and its implications for inter-Korean relations in the early part of the 21st century. Although the summit could well be an important step towards breaking down the long-standing barriers of suspicion and mistrust between Pyongyang and Seoul, it is premature to conclude (as some observers have) that the summit has heightened the prospects for reunification on the Korean peninsula. Instead of grandly portraying the 2000 summit as heralding a transition to reunification, it is far more accurate to view it as a positive step towards the more modest objective of longer-term reconciliation between the two Koreas.     

The vanity of dogmatizing: The three ‘versions’

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

The European Union—a Reflection: The Theological Challenge

Abstract

The advisor on religious affairs of the European Commission's President recently suggested the need for a European political theology. He was acknowledging Christianity's past impact on European culture. He was also intimating that a creative Christian contribution to the making of Europe's future might partly depend upon some systematic theologically informed reflection upon the nature of the challenges which the continent currently confronts. This paper does not purport to supply such a theology which, by the nature of things, must be the fruit of a long-term collaborative exercise. It does, however, seek to provide a few pointers that might become the subject of further discussion. Following clues provided by Vatican II we may seek to discern some of those "signs of the times" which might disclose the issues at stake and which, in the light of general Christian understandings, may ultimately provide some guides for subsequent action.     

The ‘Self-Positing’ Self in Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death

In response to the claim that Kierkegaard's highly compressed definition of the self, given near the beginning of The Sickness unto Death, should be understood in Hegelian terms, I show that it can be better understood in terms of an earlier development in the history of German idealism, namely, Fichte's theory of self-consciousness. The notion that the self “posits” itself found in this theory will be used to explain Kierkegaard's definition of the self, including his rejection of the idea that the self posits itself absolutely. I go on to show how this conception of the self relates to certain features of the concept of despair described in The Sickness unto Death. This in turn allows me to indicate some implications of this conception of the self in relation to Kierkegaard's attitude towards the social and political forces shaping the modern world.     

The Legendary Zhaxi Oiser

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The Longwu Tiger Dance

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