Resurrection in slow motion: the delayed restoration of the cinema exhibition industry in post-war Rotterdam (1940–65)

Abstract

Investigating a cultural industry such as the cinema exhibition sector allows insights in the dynamic intersections between economic, social and cultural history. One of the central questions in the debates about the history of movie-going in the Netherlands centres on why the size and number of cinemas and cinema visits per capita has been significantly lower than the average in Western Europe throughout most of the twentieth century. This article monitors the restoration and repositioning of the Rotterdam cinema exhibition sector in the new city centre arising after the devastation of the bombardment of 1940. An analysis of the trade press and the archives of the influential business association ‘NBB’ suggests how effective local exhibitors were in fending off outsider entrepreneurs and regulating internal competition. Alternative networks of socio-cultural or religious or organizations were successfully prevented from setting up a viable operation exhibiting films.     

From enemy to opponent: the politics of delegitimation in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (1945–1992)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the dynamics of delegitimation of political opponents in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC), which had a relative majority and almost uninterruptedly led Italy’s governments from 1945 to 1992. The DC built its strategy of delegitimation on two levels, an ideological-religious one and a systemic one, which were only partly interdependent and overlapping. In almost half a century, the DC aimed its rhetoric and politics of delegitimation mainly at those opposition parties it considered as anti-establishment, that is, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), and the form of delegitimation changed a great deal over this period. However, it is possible to grasp a specific dynamic: from a rigid form of delegitimation, from time to time it became possible to legitimate (at least in part) the opposition parties at different times and in different ways, depending on the changes in the political sphere and in society. It was a process full of contradictions and ambiguities within which the political enemy gradually gave way to becoming a political opponent.     

From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955

This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of ‘rural welfare’, an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.     

Australia's Economic Ambitions in French New Caledonia, 1945–1955

ABSTRACT

From 1945, consistent with its broader South Pacific ambitions, Australia sought to strengthen its economic position in New Caledonia. The leaders of the European-descended ‘Caledonian’ community wanted economic autonomy for the territory and improved trade with Australia. Yet the opportunity proved illusory. France remained committed to imperial preference and economic dominance. Its revival was underwritten by Marshall Plan aid, including in New Caledonia. Australia failed to provide enough of the coal that appeared to offer economic influence. In the 1950s the Melanesians gained the vote, and the Caledonians lost political power. Conservative governments in Australia showed less interest than their Labor predecessors. Australia would have welcomed an economically autonomous New Caledonia with close Australian links, but this idea clashed with France's centralist and unitary traditions. In the tension between New Caledonia's geography and its history, France had ensured that history won.     

The Value of Culture: Congolese Art and the Promotion of Belgian Colonialism (1945–1959)

Based on the scholarship of Frans M. Olbrechts and the changes implemented in the Museum of the Belgian Congo during his directorship (from 1947 until 1958), this article argues that the institutionalization of African artefacts as art served the late Belgian colonial regime in promoting its renewed postwar commitment to the Congolese colony. In their reinvention as art and subsequent re-installation in modernist displays, the objects acquired not only a cultural, but also an economic and political value as resources, which led to their co-option in the mise-en-valeur, or valorization, of the colony and fuelled a colonial rhetoric that replaced an earlier emphasis on the civilizing mission with a construction of cultural guardianship based on the universal value of the objects as art.     

Overcoming legacies of foreign policy (dis)interests in the negotiation of the European Union–Australia free trade agreement*

ABSTRACT

Despite a troubled trade history dominated by disputes over agriculture, the negotiation of a European Union (EU)–Australia free trade agreement (FTA) was initiated in 2015. The initiation of these negotiations was made possible because of the shift in EU trade policy towards the negotiation of what the EU terms ‘new generation free trade agreements’. The EU has concluded FTA negotiations with South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam and Canada, and is negotiating other FTAs— notably with Japan and the USA . The EU faces many commercial challenges to its FTA negotiations that go beyond tariff reduction, including the protection of its geographical indicators, public procurement and investor–state dispute settlement. These issues are likely to be substantial features of any EU FTA with Australia. In addition to these challenges, the promotion of sustainable development interests and human rights through FTA negotiations is an important component of the EU’s approach. The EU’s position on the trade-related aspects of sustainable development and the negotiation of human rights conditionality has presented significant challenges to the EU’s trade agenda, particularly in negotiations with Canada and Singapore. This article draws lessons from the EU’s new generation trade agreement negotiations to date. It compares these negotiations with Australia’s approach to FTA negotiations, and analyses potential stumbling blocks for an EU–Australia FTA in light of past tensions in the relationship. The article argues that shifts in both EU and Australian trade policies and positive developments in the relationship mitigate past obstacles to a negotiated agreement. However, EU– Australia relations still suffer from the tyranny of distance. The resulting deficit in foreign policy salience between the EU and Australia broadens the best alternatives to a negotiated agreement.     

The gradual transformation of a weak but enduring regime: contemporary French prostitution policy in transition (1946–2016)

Historically, states have tended to opt for one of three prostitution policy regimes: prohibition, regulation or the abolition of state regulation with a view to providing social support to the individuals involved. This is the approach France has espoused since 1960. Nevertheless, while the state has remained committed to abolitionism, the policies and laws adopted in the name of French abolitionism have varied considerably. This coexistence of stability and change challenges current assumptions of how policy regimes behave and evolve. This is because internal policy change suggests that the regime is weak, and weak regimes that experience strong political challenges are assumed to wither away or collapse. Consequently, this article presents the historical case study of contemporary French prostitution policy, and seeks to explain how and why this policy regime has changed the way it has since World War II. It describes the three phases that have contributed to the evolution of policy in this area, from sex workers’ rights protests in the mid 1970s, to the introduction of a demand-side ban on prostitution in 2016. In doing so, it explains how strong commitment to policy ideas can help sustain an otherwise weak or ineffective policy regime.     

In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems and the physical assimilation of immigrants (1938–1955)

ABSTRACT

Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demographic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938.