Penicillin and the European response to post-war American hegemony: the case of Leo-penicillin

In post-war years, penicillin played a fundamental role in radically changing the system of pharmaceutical research and production, with US firms and research centres taking the lead. As with other areas of science and technology it also became a domain in which European actors sought to adapt to and counter US policies and practices of hegemony, becoming part of a broader pattern of US–European relationships during the Cold War. Three European companies succeeded in catching up with the Anglo-American companies and became large antibiotics producers. This paper reconstructs the story of one of them, Løvens Kemiske Fabrik (now Leo Pharma), and of its Leo-penicillin, focusing on previously unexplored material from Leo Pharma corporate archives and on other archival sources. Løven’s case is particularly interesting, because the Danish firm had no substantial pre-war expertise in fermentation, the key technical skill required in penicillin production. More specifically, the argument is that the choices of pharmaceutical companies played a major role in the European answer to the invasion of American penicillin, finding market, rather than state-sponsored, methods to counter US hegemony. This response, though, also highlighted the limits of European capabilities in the 1940s and the early 1950s.     

THE LONG-RUN ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF FEDERAL,STATE, AND LOCAL FISCAL POLICIES IN METROPOLITAN AREAS*

ABSTRACT. This paper uses new estimates of metropolitan factor demand and output supply functions to study how federal, state, and local fiscal policies affect metropolitan economies. We illustrate our work with findings for ten metropolitan areas in five states for changes in state corporate income taxes, local property taxes, the federal corporate income tax, an investment tax credit, interest rates, public capital stocks, output prices, and tax and regulatory policies affecting gross wages. It is clear from these simulations that a policy that is nominally the same everywhere will have repercussions that vary widely across regions and cities.     

Revisiting Dred Scott: Prudence,Providence, and the Limits of Constitutional Statesmanship

Abstract

After the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Abraham Lincoln embarked on a public campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery in the federal territories. Lincoln's opposition to Dred Scott was, however, bound up with a certain theoretical orientation that is often rejected in the general milieu of modern constitutional theory. Within the context of two recent revisionist accounts of slavery and American constitutionalism, I argue that our retrospective evaluations of the sixteenth president's statesmanship must enter into a deeper engagement with Lincoln's attachment to natural law and his theological interpretation of the Civil War.     

The moral ecology of colonial infrastructure and the vicissitudes of land rights in rural Pakistan

For the last 10 years, the Pakistan army has not been able to collect rent from tenant farmers on its military farms in central Punjab. In this article, I analyse the historical and cultural significance of this contested land by using insights from recent literature on the politics of infrastructure to examine the contingency of rule in Pakistan, a postcolonial state, which is dominated by its army. I illustrate these dynamics by exploring the challenge brought up by a peasant movement to tacit cultural understandings about land and political subjectivity in central Punjab, the folkloric heartland of Pakistani nationalism. I argue that place-based movements, like the Punjab Tenants Association, can radically challenge our sense of place by giving a relational account of land as both a material substance and a crucial link in the set of relations that define moral, economic and political life. This approach broadens the emerging study of infrastructures by engaging insights from science/technology studies and subaltern studies to examine how cultural legacies of colonial infrastructure projects shape state–society relations in Pakistan.     

Social protest and its policing in the “heart of the European crisis regime”: The case of Blockupy in Frankfurt,Germany

Under the name of ‘Blockupy’ the city of Frankfurt am Main witnessed major social protests between 2012 and 2015 against the European crisis management and its devastating impacts on the livelihoods of people all over Europe. By assuming a Gramscian perspective, with a special focus on struggles over hegemony in the realm of coercion itself, this paper, analyzes the early Blockupy movement from 2012 to 2013, and argues that these protests were able to successfully challenge the neoliberal hegemonic story of EU austerity politics in Germany for two main reasons. First, Blockupy at that time was able to avoid criminalization by practicing a professionalized politics of hegemony that actively sought to intervene in public debates and by establishing a code of conduct shared by all participating groups. Second, Blockupy's geography and its place-based, multi-scalar and networked character were crucial, in that they drew on spatial strategies derived from the traditions and experiences of different social movements. Blockupy was multi-scalar and networked in that it brought together national, local and European movements by networking across scales, and it was placebased in two respects: it used and reignited the urban social movement infrastructure that was in place in Frankfurt after decades of social struggles within and against global city formation; and it strategically used Frankfurt's material and symbolic status as a global city.     

现代消费主义对发展中国家的影响及其后果

二战之后,作为一种全球资本主义价值观,源于美国的现代消费主义对发展中国家迈向现代化过程产生了很大的影响,很大程度上成为美国试图改变当地人思想意识和维护全球霸权的一种手段。走向现代消费社会似乎成为很多发展中国家不可避免的选择,然而,对美国大众消费模式的盲目追求和模仿并不符合发展中国家的实际国情,必然会产生很多不利于经济发展和社会稳定的消极后果,也会导致人们的思想意识出现混乱。     

Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the dialogue with the PCI

In this article I study the theoretical impact of Cold War ideology on Italian democracy through the dialogue between Norberto Bobbio and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party in the mid-1950s, in particular the philosopher Galvano della Volpe and the General Secretary Palmiro Togliatti. I claim that Bobbio's choice of dialogue with the 'enemies' of the western model of democracy was in itself a criticism of the Cold War logic and its Manichean theology of good and evil. What I call Bobbio's politics of dialogue has been roundly criticized in Italy, particularly since 1989, when revisionist scholars accused the non-Communist intellectuals of previous generations of not understanding Communist totalitarianism. I take the revisionists' challenges as my point of departure for an analysis of Bobbio's politics of dialogue and its underlying theoretical implications. Bobbio challenged the Communists on three related topics: the theory of the state, the philosophical character of Marxism, and the theory of liberty. Keeping the door open to illiberals did not imply relativism or passive acceptance of any opinion: failure to understand this basic fact led late revisionists to misinterpret Bobbio's dialogue with the PCI as a sign of weakness rather than strength. The dialogue strengthened Bobbio's conviction that it was crucial to link the defense of individual liberty to the defense of democracy, and thus avoid the dualism between negative and positive liberty, liberalism and democracy, a trait peculiar to Cold War liberalism as well as its leftist antagonists.     

Wages of War: Manufacturing Nationalism During World War II

Abstract: During World War II the state created a new and deeper set of relationships with defense contractors. These contractors manufactured the vast majority of war materials and relied extensively on the state for financing. These same contractors also encouraged workers and civilians to understand their every minute action as contributing to the war effort. In order to fully integrate workers’ and civilians’ lives into the war effort, the state and industry created and distributed a war wage—a sense of contribution, national belonging, and sacrifice. In this paper I analyze the wartime records of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in order to understand how the state and industry created the war wage alongside the military–industrial complex. With the help of the war wage, the state and industry radically expanded the production of war materials and enlisted a more compliant population of workers and civilians into the war effort.     

The City Evita Built. Cinematic Childhood and Peronism in Luis César Amadori’s Soñemos (1951)

This article examines the under-studied film productions known in Peronist Argentina as “docudramas”. Placing documentary elements within a fictional plot, docudramas marked a significant change in the state propaganda machine and were used as a new vehicle to influence social habits. I focus particularly on Soñemos [Let’s Dream], a short film directed in 1951 by Luis César Amadori to showcase urban reforms. Through an analysis of Amadori’s docudrama in regard to its representation of the Children’s City built by the Eva Perón Foundation, I discuss relationships between entertainment, the constitution of a political hegemony, and modernisation. With film techniques such as the dissolve, Soñemos depicts the Children’s City as an enterprise capable of delivering material happiness and amplifies the narrative of a fairy tale come true promised by Evita’s social service programmes. Ultimately, the docudrama affirms the central role played by the state in the definition of the “right to a home” – from supportive benefactor to constitutive replacement.     

Practising Development at Home: Race,Gender, and the “Development” of the American South

Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development—a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism—needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African‐American women.     

Constructing national identity in Canada's capital, 1900–2000: Confederation Square and the National War Memorial

Ottawa's Confederation Square was initially planned to be a civic plaza to balance the nearby federal presence of Parliament Hill. A century of federal planning, with the direct involvement of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, repositioned it as a national space in the City Beautiful style. Recent renovations have improved its pedestrian amenity and restored much of the original plan by French urban designer Jacques Gréber. The square contains the National War Memorial and the National Arts Centre, yet is a weak public space due to weak edge definition, animation, and spatial enclosure. The war memorial design was selected in a 1925 international competition won by Britain's Vernon March. The Great War monument was not installed until the 1939 Royal visit, and Mackenzie King intended that the re-planning of the capital would be the World War II memorial. However, the symbolic meaning of the Great War monument gradually expanded to become the place of remembrance for all Canadian war sacrifices. The National War Memorial is more successful as a symbolic object than Confederation Square is as a public space, yet both have evolved into important elements of the Canadian capital's national identity.     

There are Many Roads to Reindustrialization and Resilience: Place-based Approaches in Three German Urban Regions

Reindustrialization has become a major political objective in the European Union. This paper provides three urban case studies on reindustrialization pathways and experiences during the global economic crisis to reveal the specificities of place-based approaches on the local level despite common policies on EU, federal and state levels. Moreover, the evolutionary perspective on reindustrialization and economic resilience shows the importance of adaptive capabilities on the local level, although the sources for these capabilities differ according to context- and place-specific structures.     

Infrastructure Nation: State Space,Hegemony, and Hydraulic Regionalism in Pakistan

Large‐scale infrastructures are often understood by state planners as fulfilling a national integrative function. This paper challenges the idea of infrastructures as national integrators by engaging theories of state/nation formation and infrastructure in a postcolonial context. Specifically, I put Lefebvre's characterization of the production of state space as a homogenization‐differentiation dialectic in conversation with Gramsci's understanding of hegemony, bureaucracy, and nationalism to analyze the controversy surrounding the giant Tarbela Dam in Pakistan in the 1960s. I use the Tarbela controversy as a case study to elaborate a theory of postcolonial nation‐formation through state‐led infrastructural projects. I argue that in a postcolonial context the failure to articulate a hegemonic nationalist ideology to accompany the production of large‐scale infrastructure results in a fragmentation of state space in some ways, even as state space is homogenized and integrated in other ways. The paper also offers a “hydraulic lens” on the politics of regionalism in Pakistan.     

A path towards Fascism: nationalism and large-scale industry in Italy (1910–1923)

In the decade before World War I, close connections developed in Italy between the nationalists and major elements of large-scale industry. As the Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910, became the main political reference for industrialists, the ties between nationalism and the business community helped to undermine the liberal state and end the political system established by Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, the Nationalist Association developed close links with the Ansaldo company and supported it in the ‘parallel wars’ of Italian capitalism. Ansaldo went bankrupt in 1921, but the nationalists were able to establish relations with other entrepreneurs. Their connection with large-scale industry lay behind Mussolini’s decision in 1923 to accept the Nationalist Association into the National Fascist Party. Nationalism not only ensured that important economic forces would support the Fascist regime but its ideology significantly contributed to the building of Mussolini’s dictatorship.     

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.     

FEMININITY, PLACE AND COMMODITIES: A RETAIL CASE STUDY

Recent accounts of the significance of consumption and commodities in the constitution of femininity have stressed the fluidity of consumption practices and the indeterminacy of their meaning for the oppression of women. The role of place in the construction of femininity has not been considered in these accounts, and as such uni-dimensional portraits of the consumption-femininity nexus have prevailed. In this article I offer an alternative place-based account of the construction of femininity through consumption, demonstrating the constitution of gendered relations of consumption in place. In so doing, some of the contradictions in the consumption-femininity nexus are highlighted. Using a case study of one facet of consumption - retailing - I demonstrate the importance of place and context in the construction of femininity through consumption, in three substantive ways. First, the selling of commodities by retail institutions entails the creation of place. Second, the construction of femininity - shopping as an important component of domestic labor and shopping as feminine, is part of this creation of place. Third, this environment and the process of shopping influence the meaning of commodities and associated constructions of femininity.     

Against Value: Accumulation in the Oil Industry and the Biopolitics of Labour Under Finance

Current theses on the financialization of capitalism postulate a shift from investment in material growth to financial channels, with the implication that the extraction of value from the labour process is no longer the central locus of corporate profitability and that the antagonism between labour and capital in the accumulation process has been displaced by the tension between corporate managers and financial markets. This article challenges both claims of financialization and its political implications. Using an analysis of the oil industry in the US, focusing particularly on layoffs, I argue that, instead of inhibiting material accumulation, financialization signals a change in the form of investment that has led to the intensification of labour and its deepening subsumption under capital, transcending labour exploitation and extending the sovereignty of capital over the life of living labour.     

Race-ing Rape: Representations of Sexual Violence in American Combat Films

Abstract

Although portrayals of the rape of Asian women in American combat films are associated with the Vietnam War movie, such scenarios first became an established trope of the combat genre in films made during and about World War II. While pre-Vietnam War films used rape as a narrative device to justify US foreign and military policy, Vietnam combat films later used it as metaphor for US imperialism. Notwithstanding this difference, the combat film’s representation of sexual violence both pre- and post-Vietnam has always thrived on its confirmation of an American hegemony predicated on the subjugation of peoples (and, in particular, women) of colour.     

The suppression of the Congo rebellions and the rise of Mobutu, 1963–5

ABSTRACT

The first years of the Congo as an independent state were marked by instability and rebellion as local nationalist struggles became embroiled in what NATO powers feared could lead to the loss of hegemony over the country and its vast mineral wealth, if not into a theatre of Cold War politics. This article focuses on the series of rebellions, including the Mulelist revolt and the Simba uprising, that took place in the Congo from late 1963 into 1965. Belgian, British, and US diplomatic and Congolese military sources are used to analyse the intervention of the West against the Congolese rebels, in support of the Congo government in Léopoldville headed by Prime Minister Tshombe and President Kasa Vubu. Belgian, US, and Congolese sources on this military campaign led by Belgian officers, known as ‘the Ommegang’, allow a detailed analysis of the planning and execution of the assault on the rebel stronghold Stanleyville by Belgian officers, white mercenaries and the forces of the Congo Army, including the decision to deploy Belgian parachutists, dropped by US aircraft. These events culminated in the coup that brought Mobutu to political power in Congo in November 1965, marking out the trajectory of the county's history for the next three decades.