Italy's unfinished transition: between domestic dynamics and international change

In the early 1990s, Italy was drawn into a spiral of unprecedented transformation precipitated by changes that were taking place both inside Italy and on the international scene. Financial, political and institutional crises were superimposed in ways that brought into question the survival of the whole Italian system. This occurred at a moment when world geo-political relations were shifting dramatically and radically changing established relations, attitudes and policies and marked the beginning of a long period that is often described as a ‘transition’. But since the outcomes still remain far from certain, it is necessary to consider how accurately this term describes what has been taking place in Italy over the last two decades. This paper shows how more careful identification of the different phases and components of the crisis enable us to understand why the upheavals of 1992–94 have led to a systemic crisis of the Italian economy and politics.     

Coconut Crisis in Kerala? Mainstream Narrative and Alternative Perspectives

India's oilseeds sector, which includes its coconut economy, experienced drastic changes in the wake of agricultural liberalization in the mid‐1990s. A persistent coconut crisis ‘narrative’ emerged after sharp price declines between 2000 and 2002 in which small farmers in the state of Kerala, India's main coconut producer, were identified as victims of the liberalized importation of cheap palm oil. This article describes this crisis narrative based on a literature review of academic and official reports, and challenges its problem analysis by juxtaposing it with information from ethnographic research with local farmers and traders. The research indicates that local labour shortages and increased regional competition also had a strong impact on Kerala's coconut market, production and processing, which varied from region to region. Furthermore, small farmers, with their diversified livelihoods, did not recognize a ‘crisis’ as such. Drawing upon the ‘advocacy coalition framework’, the article also indicates reasons for the emergence and persistence of the coconut crisis narrative and points to complex processes of restructuring social space in the age of globalization.     

Tourism,farm abandonment,and the ‘typical’ Vermonter, 1880–1930

This paper explores the relationship between tourism, abandoned landscapes, and the construction of ‘typical’ identity in rural Vermont. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Vermonters were both celebrated in the popular press as archetypal Americans and depicted as a people in decline. With the state's reputation plagued by rural out-migration, many reformers, state officials, and rural residents tried to shore up and reproduce the identity of the so-called typical Vermonter through the sale of abandoned farms as summer homes. The promise of summer tourism as a means for reproducing typicality in rural Vermont, however, was complicated by the contingency of the category typical and by persistent fears that a new leisure-based economy and allegedly ‘wrong kinds’ of visitors would undermine the integrity of the state's traditional rural identity. As a result, visitors and residents negotiated an ideal of rural typicality according to changing tourist circumstances—a process revealed in this essay largely through published commentaries and promotional works. What this story traces, then, is landscape's role in the production of ‘ideal’, tourist-based notions of rural identity in American culture.     

Isomorphism and legitimacy in Spanish contract archaeology: the free-fall of an institutional model and the caveat of change

Societies today face multiple challenges stemming from the conflict between ‘market efficiency’ and ‘social welfare’ that are, in turn, the result of neoliberal policies affecting institutional legitimacy. Complex institutional logics associated with organisational responses are part of the early sociological debate about how organisations cope with established institutionalism in order to maintain legitimacy and survive. By employing an institutional framework and historical event sequencing approach, we aim to understand whether normative pressures can be understood to exert an influence of embeddedness and change. The paper analyses the emergence of Spanish contract archaeology after the 1990s. This new organisational pattern in the field of archaeology was a complex institutionalised process that gave rise to a new labour market. The economic crisis starting in 2008 has impacted this sector severely, to the extent that it is, at the time of writing, on the brink of extinction.     

Origins of State Housing Policy in Canada: the Case of the Central Mortgage Bank

In the literature, Canadian federal housing policy is most often considered to be a post-Second World War phenomenon and to have been effectively initiated, at least in an institutional sense, with the establishment of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (chmc) in 1945 (Bettison, 1975; Hatch. 1975; Rose, 1980). It is generally accepted that the state was led to intervene in the private housing market as a result of an unprecedented demand from returning servicemen. This demand was heightened by increasing levels of disposable income and exacerbated by reduced levels of housing production during the war. In this scenario. the state is seen to have been responding to a specific market crisis; the response resulted in the creation of various agencies, most notably cmhc, and in National Housing Act amendments, virtually all of which took place in the post-war era. The ‘market-crisis’ perspective to the study of federal housing policy tends to overlook the initiation of state monetary and credit system management during the 1930s and its implications for the form of state intervention in housing during the 1940s and beyond. I wish to make a case here for pushing back the study boundaries to at least the early 1930s in conjunction with a brief examination of the Central Mortgage Bank (cmb). The argument is that the essential ‘actors’ in the determination of housing policy at the federal level (i.e. the Department of Finance, the institutional lenders [particularly the insurance companies], and the provinces) came to be delineated in the 1930s around the issue of debt management in the wake of widespread mortgage default, especially in the rural districts of the prairie provinces. The cmb, although never becoming active, is seen here as the first substantial collaboration between the state and finance capital in the area of residential mortgage lending practices. It represents an additional facet of state monetary and credit system management that proceeded apace with the formation of the Bank of Canada in 1935.     

Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-help in Thailand

ABSTRACT A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state-building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift-giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradictions within both the past and the present. He then draws on a study in Thailand to show how the ‘village’ was a product of state-building, and how in the past the idiom of ‘helping’ constituted relations of domination and extraction as well as more egalitarian relations of mutual help. The use of the language of the gift confers power on the giver; since the 1930s, state officials have appropriated and transformed the language of ‘helping’ to coerce villagers into working on ‘development’ projects. Until the 1970s, villagers described ‘development’ as coerced serf labour, but since then, they have struggled with mixed results to redefine development as their right to participate in the national and global product. The author finishes by arguing that, in the context of the current global crisis of accumulation, we should reclaim rural development as a democratic right, opposing neoliberal attempts to redefine it as a gift which government and development agencies can discontinue at their will.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Sport and society in Italy today

Summary

In ‘Itinerary’ Patrick McCarthy provides an introduction to the four articles that examine the connections between sport, politics, business and contemporary culture in Italy. Noting that mass participation in sport has been closely related to modernization, McCarthy argues that the forms of contemporary mass sport reflect the particular cultural, political and economic conditions of each European society. In Italy these made soccer and cycling the most popular mass sports by 1945.

Patrizia Dogliani’s article ‘Sport and Fascism’ examines the development of mass sport in Italy from the late nineteenth century, showing the critical role played by the Fascist regime, which rapidly expanded public sports facilities while the language of politics and combat permeated the vocabulary of sport in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially the emphasis was on international competition as a symbol of national virility, but following the success of Germany and the USA in the 1936 Olympics the regime’s search for consensus placed new emphasis on recreational aspects. The institutional and administrative organization of sport established in the 1930s remained in place in Italy, however, until more recendy.

In ‘Itinerary 2’ McCarthy examines the roles of the boxer Carnera from Friuli and the racing driver Tazio Nuvolari as sporting heroes of Mussolini’s Italy and in ‘Itinerary 3’ shows how the struggles between Catholic Italy and Communist Italy were personified in the rivalry between the cyclists Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi in the post-war period.

In ‘Itinerary 4’ he asks why soccer had by the 1970s overtaken cycling as Italy’s most popular sport. That theme is examined in greater detail by Nicola Porro and Pippa Russo, whose article reconstructs the ‘hybridization of sport, mass media and politics’ in Italy in the 1990s. Its central focus is Silvio Berlusconi, the self-made media tycoon who founded Fininvest in the 1970s, acquired AC Milan in 1986, and by 1994 controlled a media empire that enabled him to found a new political party (Forza Italia) and become Italy’s Prime Minister albeit for less than a year. Porro and Russo examine the ways in which Berlusconi’s roles in the world of the media and professional soccer have changed both Italian politics and Italian sport.

In ‘Itinerary 5’ McCarthy sets the example of Berlusconi in the context of the integration of soccer and mass media, the commercialization and politicization of sport at a global level in the last decade. These issues are developed in greater detail in Emanuela Poli’s article, ‘The revolution in the televised soccer market’, which emphasizes the critical role that has been played by soccer and soccer clubs in the development of the new media empires based on digital pay-per-view TV and the sale of sporting events in the 1990s. This has left control of the sport (in terms of who can watch and when) in the hands of major international communications moguls like Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch.

‘Itinerary 6’ links the fragmentation of collective myths like the national soccer championships to the decline of the nation state, and surveys the situation of other sports in Italy (the Americas Cup, skiing, rugby football. Formula 1 motor racing and the gymnasium). The latter is the subject of the final article by Roberta Sassatelli on ‘The commercialization of discipline: keep-fit culture and its values’ which explores the social and cultural meanings attached to the growing vogue for fitness clubs and the shaping of the ideal body in contemporary Italy.     

Looking ‘The Gift’ in the mouth: Russia as donor (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While the Soviet Union was a significant donor of international development aid, since the 1990s, a generation of Russians has experienced the subject position of ‘recipient’ in the global political economy. However, following its G8 presidency in 2006, Russia officially signalled its intention to (re‐)emerge as an aid donor. Should the Russian government's efforts to join the global community of donors be understood as a defence mechanism against what Mauss called the ‘wounding’ experience of being treated as a perpetual recipient? International development aid is seen here as a cultural phenomenon whose underlying assumptions are both challenged and affirmed by the arrival of ‘emerging donors’ such as Russia.     

The International Monetary Fund and its New Economics

This article focuses on a key element of the IMF's agenda for change: the repackaging of its economics of crisis around inflation targeting. It examines how this new policy regime redefines the political economy of the IMF's policy advice, and contextualizes it by focusing on Eastern Europe, the region worst affected by the global financial crisis which began in 2007. The article compares the conditionalities designed under the new and old policy regimes and argues that the mainstreaming of inflation targeting reproduces the IMF's function within a neoliberal political economy. It shows how, depending on the role of the IMF in the policy process, the models that inform policy are employed differently. During ‘normal’ times, models engender a contractionary bias that favours speculative capital. When acting as ‘lender of last resort’, the IMF retains the traditional emphasis on fiscal contractions, paying only lip service to its new economics of crisis while further ignoring crucial questions of macroeconomic policy coordination or the destabilizing potential of short‐term capital inflows.     

Change in the Innovation Process: New Knowledge Production and Competitive Cities--The Case of Stuttgart

The global integration of economic activities is bringing with it major changes in innovation processes. New kinds of innovation, such as service and organizational innovations, became increasingly important in the 1990s. The shift to new forms of knowledge creation reflects the emerging knowledge based economy. This has effects on the existing comparative advantages of metropolitan innovation systems and is a major challenge to the ability of cities to adjust, especially those in mature industrial sectors whose competitiveness is based on innovations in industrial technology and scientific and technological knowledge production. Stuttgart is one of these cities. Much of the comparative innovative strength of the Stuttgart region derives from the generation of synergy effects of its technological and institutional development paths. The high levels of industrial exports and the competitiveness of the global players in the Stuttgart region indicates how advantageous the technology based knowledge production and diffusion in the region has been for the innovativeness of the core industrial branches. The crisis at the start of the 1990s showed that the economic success of particular firms does not mean that the metropolitan region as a whole is innovative and competitive. The institutional structures used to establish and maintain the comparative innovative advantages of the industrial sector have hindered adjustment to new forms of knowledge production and diffusion. The paper examines the adjustment processes in the Stuttgart region which are changing the organization of innovation and learning in a way that makes it receptive to new forms of knowledge production and diffusion.     

A Forgotten Instrument of Global Capitalism?International Concessions, 1870–1930

From the mid-1800s through the 1930s, concessions were an institutional foundation of modern capitalism about which we have little systematic, comparative knowledge. Concessions - contracts given by governments in less-developed states to foreign investors - supplied elements that were lacking in the host country, including a congenial legal order and an attractive investment environment. Cash-poor governments eager to modernise often added special privileges and monopoly rights to concessions in order to attract capital. In Africa and Asia, all the colonial powers granted concessions to promote the building of infrastructure and development of commercial agriculture without burdening the Treasury. After providing a global survey of concessions with special attention to Russia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and French West Africa, the author concludes that concessions, by their nature, entailed contradictions that made them a ‘third best’ option for political elites eager to incorporate peripheral regions into the world economy.     

Leaving the Nest: The Rise of Regional Financial Arrangements and the Future of Global Governance

This article examines the impact of regional financial arrangements (RFAs) on the global liquidity regime. It argues that the design of RFAs could potentially alter the global regime, whether by strengthening it and making it more coherent or by decentring the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and destabilizing it. To determine possible outcomes, this analysis deploys a ‘middle‐up’ approach that focuses on the institutional design of these RFAs. It first draws on the rational design of institutions framework to identify the internal characteristics of RFAs that are most relevant to their capabilities and capacities. It then applies these insights to the interactions of RFAs with the IMF, building on Aggarwal's (1998) concept of ‘nested’ versus ‘parallel’ institutions, to create an analytical lens through which to assess the nature and sustainability of nested linkages. Through an analysis of the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) and the Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR), the article demonstrates the usefulness of this lens. It concludes by considering three circumstances in which fault lines created by these RFAs’ institutional design could be activated, permitting an institution to ‘leave the nest’, including changing intentions of principals, creation of parallel capabilities and facilities, and failure of the global regime to address regional needs in a crisis.     

Beyond the Washington Consensus? Asia and Latin America in search of more autonomous development

International economic power (the ability to shape rules of global economic conduct) needs to be understood in terms of the interactions between rule‐makers and rule‐takers in the global economy. Attempts to reshape development paradigms through interventions during financial crisis have been highly significant for the domestic political economy of the developing world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the primary question was how much countries would liberalize in response to financial crisis. Reactions to the crises of the late 1990s in Asia and Latin America were more varied. This article explores domestic political responses to crises in both regions in the 1980s and late 1990s. It argues that countries are finding it increasingly difficult to trump domestic political pressure for change with arguments about technocratic necessity. Popular pressure is pushing governments into new experiments in economic nationalism, not a radical rejection of global economic integration, but a reshaping of relationships in an attempt to secure national interests and, in some cases, to devote more resources to welfare. Experiments to date are modest, but could presage more significant change in the future.     

After ‘the collapse’: Strategic selectivity,Icelandic state elites and the management of European Union accession

Iceland’s 2008 financial crisis has received considerable scholarly attention from economics and business science perspectives. Far less consideration has been given to the political–administrative consequences of ‘the collapse’ in terms of its restructuring state-based projects and instituting new scalar strategies, and, specifically, the role played in this process by Icelandic political and policy elites. We focus on this issue by analyzing recent attempts to reconfigure Iceland’s sceptical position towards the EU by promulgating state narratives of ‘EUrope’ as a ‘safe haven’ for the shattered national economy as part of the country’s formal application for EU membership. We show within the Icelandic state there is, however, a highly fragmented and polarized position on EU accession. Drawing on Jessop’s strategic relational approach, we demonstrate that this derives from the actions of different elite fractions seeking to establish parameters for strategic selectivity on EU accession in ways that support their own interests. ‘EUrope’ emerges as a complex institutional category which is both shaped by, and shapes, the rhetorical interventions and actions of Icelandic state elites in often contradictory ways, demonstrating the fundamental political dynamics of what is emerging as a fraught, fiercely contested EU accession process. We conclude that times of conflicting elite narratives are also moments of potentially significant state change.     

Resurrections and rebirths: how the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics

The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Risorgimento by the left and by the Resistance during the 1930s and 1940s, the general semantic space carved by the post-war democratic forces on both right and left with reference to the Risorgimento, and the sudden return to the memory of the Risorgimento in the 1990s and afterwards. The aim of the article is to understand both continuities and changes in the reference to the Risorgimento in twentieth-century political discourse, and to put into perspective Italy’s ‘particular’ road to modernity within a comparative European frame.     

Straight Pins,Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.     

Trump,the authoritarian populist revolt and the future of the rules-based order in Asia

In this short article, the authors analyse the implications of the election of Donald Trump for the future of the liberal rules-based order, with specific emphasis on its implications for the Asian region. Departing from the institutional fetishism that figures prominently in the literature, the authors argue that this liberal order needs to be conceptualised in terms of its social foundations. Particularly important to consider, in terms of understanding these social foundations, is the nature of social relations in the USA. The election of Trump reflects the deep crisis of the US state and the rise of a new ‘authoritarian populism’. The authors trace the roots of this authoritarian populism to patterns of global capitalist transformation, the crisis of the US state and the modes of crisis management that this has generated. They then explore the implications of Trump’s authoritarian populism for the region.     

Two systems in one country: the origin,functions, and mechanisms of the rural-urban dual system in China

ABSTRACT

This paper takes an interdisciplinary perspective to focus on the role played by the rural-urban dual system in China’s urbanization and migration. We explain its establishment in China in the 1950s and its genealogy in the industrialization strategy adopted in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the reform era, the system has been refashioned to suit a new set of demands of the state industrialization strategy to cater for the global economy. We analyze the mechanisms of the dual system, and how it has helped generate low-cost migrant labor for urban employers and siphon off revenues for urban governments by expropriating rural land. We also argue that there are fundamental differences between the dual system and the common “dualism,” based on the Lewis dual-sector model, as observed in many developing countries. The plight of children of migrants is used to illustrate the main points made in the paper. Our research challenges the prevailing perspectives in Chinese geography and urban studies, many of which are based on market-driven neoclassical economics or global neoliberalism, often ignoring China’s historical and institutional contexts.     

Paul Cohen-Portheim: questions of nationalism,messianism and nostalgia in a prison camp in England, 1914–1918

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the little-known Jewish writer Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880–1932) and his notions of nationalism and Zionism. Born in Berlin to Austrian parents of Sephardic origin, Cohen-Portheim was interned during the First World War in various English prison camps. This experience profoundly affected his intellectual outlook and he dedicated much of his effort to the fight against nationalism. It was in the English prison camps that he developed an eclectic theory of nationalism which combines a quasi-evolutionary progress towards global justice with a messianic notion of Zionism. The Jewish people play a crucial role in Cohen-Portheim’s vision of a world devoid of nationalism, whose absurdity is disclosed in the arrival of Zionism. Juxtaposing Europe’s crisis of culture and Asia’s spiritual vitality, Cohen-Portheim ascribes to Zionism a bridging of the gap that separates Europe and Asia, and fragments modern nationalistic man. This article follows Cohen-Portheim’s intellectual development and highlights shifts and continuities in his writing, arguing that he shows two different types of nostalgia, namely a longing for the East as developed in his early works and a longing for the past as displayed in his last major work.