The Erasmus undergraduate exchange programme: a highly qualified success story?

Erasmus is regarded as a European success story: an example of cross-border cooperation and an opportunity for students to improve their inter-cultural skills and work capacities. This article takes an in-depth look at this success, examining recent trends in Erasmus mobility. Analysis shows that while certain countries have greater numbers of students outgoing than incoming, the converse situation is found in countries such as Portugal. To explain this imbalance, evidence is drawn from a study of Erasmus in Portugal conducted during 2016. While the popularity of the country as a destination is related to low cost of living, friendliness and educational quality, interviews with managers of the Erasmus programme reveal other factors that limit the participation of local students. This includes the low level of Erasmus scholarships for undergraduates from families affected by the economic crisis, with exchange students also increasingly viewed as tourists and consumers as well as learners.     

The evolution of the responsibility to protect: at a crossroads?

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), now ten years old, has been widely accepted at the international level. As the books under review demonstrate, debates around its legitimacy are over. Instead, we see a developing second generation of literature focusing on how the R2P needs to be understood more concretely in both academic and policy terms, as well as how it affects the linked issues of humanitarian intervention and state‐building. Within this literature, we see new and important questions emerging. These include how and when we should intervene and whether we can be successful at it; how we can assist states to ensure they fulfill their own responsibilities towards their populations; and where international authority lies. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are hard ones. Implementation, and how it reflects embedded culture at the international level, may be as hard—if not harder—as introducing the doctrine originally.     

The invasion of Iraq: what are the morals of the story?

It is uncontroversial that the invasion and occupation of Iraq involved the following errors: the misinterpretation of intelligence; the underestimation of the number of troops requisite for law and order; the disbanding of the Iraqi army; and indiscriminate debaathification of the civil service. The first error was one of imagination rather than virtue; the others were caused by ‘callousness”, impatience, and consequent imprudence. These vices were partly responsible for massive civilian casualties, which many wrongly assume to teach the fundamentally erroneous character of the invasion. Nonetheless, we should beware such moral flaws in tomorrow's policy‐makers and renounce the managerial mentality that fosters them. Another lesson is that, in so far as nation‐rebuilding requires substantial and long‐term commitments, it must command the support of the nation‐builder's domestic electorate; and to do that, it must be able to justify itself in terms of the national interest. From this we should not infer the further lesson that morality's reach into foreign policy is limited, since, according to Thomist ethics, the pursuit of the national interest can itself be moral. Finally, one lesson that we should not learn from Iraq is never again to violate the letter of international law and intervene militarily in a sovereign state without Security Council authorization. The law's authority can be undermined as much by the UN's failure to enforce it, as by states taking it into their own hands. It is seriously problematic that the current international legal system denies the right of individual states to use military force unilaterally except in self‐defence, while reserving the enforcement of international law to a body, whose capacity to act is hamstrung by the right of veto. Given this situation, military intervention without Security Council authorization could be morally justified on certain conditions.     

The Retirement Village as a Residential Environment for the Third Age – The Example of Firhall,Scotland

Abstract

Retirement villages represent a recent addition to the range of residential options for older people in the UK. Research has focused on the development and nature of retirement housing in the public and voluntary sectors in England. Limited attention has been directed to the private retirement communities and, in particular, to the lived experience of residents in private sector retirement villages. This research, which is the first study of a private retirement village in Scotland, overcomes this information deficit by identifying the nature and growth of private retirement villages in the UK and exploring the lived experience of residents of the private retirement village of Firhall. The discussion is organised into four main parts. Part I examines the concept of the retirement village. Part II explains the growth and geography of retirement villages in the UK. Part III comprises the empirical analysis of the case study retirement village. The research identifies the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the village population and provides insight into lived experience of the residents in the study village. Finally, in part IV, the discussion identifies a number of key issues for further research, and the potential contribution of retirement villages for meeting the needs and preferences of the growing third age population of the UK.     

Propagating Afrikaner nationalism: The Voortrekker stamps as icons of an ideology,c.1933–1949

This paper posits the importance of visual representations in cultivating a national consciousness among white Afrikaners in South Africa. It provides a case study of stamps issued to commemorate the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938 that sought to raise awareness of and funds for the Voortrekker Monument project. Although stamps are, ordinarily, symbols of banal nationalism, the Voortrekker stamps resonated strongly with the sentiments the Afrikaner volk (people). They reified an iconography of the Voortrekkers and the narrative of the Great Trek already embedded in a canon of texts, images and rituals. The paper provides a semiotic reading of the designs of the stamps and shows how they shaped the cultural imaginary of Afrikaners. Although the Voortrekker stamps were issued with the approval of the postal authorities, they were actually commissioned by the Sentrale Volksmonumentekomitee [Central People's Monuments Committee (SVK)], which had close ties to the National Party (NP) opposition. Although the project was largely state sponsored, the SVK insisted upon its autonomy. Thus the government sanctioned a project over which it exercised no jurisdiction. The United Party paid a price for accommodating sectional Afrikaner interests when it lost control of the state in 1948.     

The spatial evolution of the Mid-western pork industry, 1835–1875

This article discusses the spatial evolution of Mid-western pork packing in the middle nineteenth century as an example of the way in which agricultural processing industries contributed to regional economic development. The changing transportation network provides an essential tool of analysis in understanding manufacturing trends in an area which was simultaneously experiencing extensive and intensive growth. A widespread dispersion of small centres catering to local demand persisted throughout the period, but declined in relative importance. Early concentration of packing was located in the Ohio River towns which were transhipment points for western farm produce on its way to external markets. The advent of railroads in the late 1840s and the 1850s initially widened the agricultural hinterland of the river ports by acting as feeder links. But as rails shipped an increasing proportion of hogs and pork products both within and beyond the region in the 1850s, rail termini became more important as processing centres. The interruption of the Civil War confirmed the ascendancy of the railroad. Then in the post-bellum decade, as settlement continued to move west, pork packing became more dependent on the rail network. A few large cities, drawing on their commercial and financial infrastructure, were able to control much of the industry through extending rails, building central stockyards and improving packing house organization. By the mid 1870s the industry stood on the verge of big business—a testimony to the economic growth of the region where it flourished.     

The enemy as the unthinkable: a concretist reading of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political

This article offers an unconventional interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political. It first identifies two alternative readings – an ‘exceptionalist’ and a ‘concretist’ one – to make the claim that in the late 1920s he laid the foundations for a theory of politics that overcame the flaws of his theory of exception. It then explains why the concretist reading provides an insightful key to Schmitt’s take on the relationship between politics and law as a whole. Despite this, the chief aim of this analysis is not interpretive. Rather, the article claims that such a paradigm change was related to Schmitt’s pondering on the elements that were menacing to draw the experience of modern statehood to an end even more seriously than any upheavals and revolutions. For he came to the conclusion that the mere claim to political self-sufficiency on the part on non-state social entities was able to defy the idea of the state as the political entity par excellence. While these reflections urged Schmitt to reformulate many features of his conception of the political, the article contends that this particular juncture in his production sheds light on a crucial feature of contemporary politics.     

‘The realities of power’: David Stoll and the story of the 1982 Guatemalan genocide

ABSTRACT

In a short opinion piece published in late 2013, anthropologist David Stoll claimed that genocide did not occur in Guatemala under the military dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), that the charges against the former general and his subsequent conviction were unsubstantiated, and that human rights conditions for the country’s Indigenous peoples, including the Ixil population of northern Quiché department, actually improved under his government. By looking at the definition of protected groups under the United Nations Genocide Convention, and such basic notions as perpetrator motives and intent in international humanitarian law, this article will address Stoll’s latest contribution to a ‘counter-narrative by Guatemalans who perceive that their side of the story [was] left out’ of the 2013 genocide trial.     

The persistence of the rural idyll: peasant imagery,social change and nationalism in Spain 1939–1978

In this article the authors propose a historical analysis of the role of romantic rural imagery in the Spanish (state and peripheral) re-nationalization processes during the Franco dictatorship through the scope of the political and identity meanings assigned to it. Their goal is to better comprehend twentieth-century Spain by examining the use (and abuse) of the rural imaginary by Spanish, Basque and Galician nationalisms, particularly during the time of the totalitarian regime of General Franco, giving special attention to the cultural loans between the ideological (and national) blocs traditionally interpreted as monolithic and irreconcilable: Francoism (1936–1975) and its political opposition.     

‘Defense of the realm’: evolution of a Capetian propaganda slogan

Historians have long recognized the importance of the Roman-canonical maxim ‘defense of the realm’ to the propaganda politics practised by later Capetian kings, most notably in the climactic struggle between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII. Although rightly conceding to Roman law the major impulse to its formulation, they have been less sensitive to the way in which the doctrine fits into historical images of Capetian kingship. The theory of the king as defender of the realm was critical in the early as well as late middle ages. In tracing the evolution of this slogan through the chronicle tradition of Saint-Denis, the most extensive and consistently royalist historical corpus in Capetian France, one sees the emergence of concepts congruent with those developed in legal and canonical texts, but which reveal little or no influence from these more learned sources.This article argues that the chroniclers' persistent focus on the image of the king as royal defender facilitated the interior evolution of the meaning of ‘defense of the realm’ from that of feudal tuitio to the public concept of Roman jurisprudence. The chroniclers of Saint-Denis thus testify to the way in which older theories of monarchy were being subtly transformed by the changing nature of kingship itself. But at the same time they lend an air of coherency and familiarity to one of the most disruptive periods of Capetian history and sustain a sense of the evolution of the French monarchy within the context of fundamental notions governing medieval kingship.