The orange and the ‘Cross in the Crescent’: imagining Palestine in 1929

Abstract. This article analyses a public discussion held in Palestine during the last months of 1929 over proposals for a particular Palestinian flag. Based on readers' reactions published in the daily newspaper Filastin and on letters sent to the Arab Executive, the article examines the character of Palestinian identity as it was imagined by a certain segment of the Palestinian elite. The three main leitmotifs of the flag proposals – the four colors of the Arab flag, the color orange and the ‘Cross in the Crescent’ emblem – serve as a starting point for discussing the tensions between Palestinian particularism and pan‐Arabism, as well as the status of Muslim‐Christian partnership in a period of increasing Islamisation of Palestinian identity. The second part of the article incorporates a comparative discussion that aims to explain the failure of the color orange and the ‘Cross in the Crescent’ to be accepted as emblems in the national flag. By comparing the unsuccessful proposals with the Arab flag (that eventually became the official Palestinian flag) and with the Lebanese flag, the article suggests their failure was due to three main reasons: (a) they reflected the interests of relatively marginal social groups; (b) they were not raised at a time of sweeping change in the socio‐political order; and (c) they lacked a profound basis in local tradition and the potential to be attached to an ancient past.     

Hereditary emblems: Material culture in the context of social change

Emblematic artifacts, which signify personal or social identity, are potentially valuable sources of information about social organization. To date, however, there has been little comparative study of the social contexts that give rise to use of different kinds of emblems, nor of the ways in which the social significance of emblematic artifacts may change over time. This paper is specifically concerned with the emergence and changing use of hereditary emblems in stratified societies. The histories of lineage devices in western Europe and Japan exhibit a number of similarities which suggest that, in complex societies, hereditary emblems are likely to appear in the presence of unstable systems of social rank. Once introduced, such emblems may acquire additional, nonhereditary, significance without undergoing noticeable iconographic change. The cases examined here suggest a series of general propositions about evolutionary relationships between hereditary emblem use and socioeconomic factors. Although we currently lack a well-developed methodology for identifying hereditary emblems archaeologically, it is clear that the key to their identification lies not in stylistic analysis, but rather in their contexts of use and patterns of association with other items of material culture. Hypotheses derived from consideration of the evolution of lineage emblems in western Europe and Japan are applied to the interpretation of shield decorations of the Archaic and Classical periods in Attic Greece.     

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.     

LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.     

The World Map as an Emblem: Abraham Ortelius and the Stoic Contemplation

Although the close association of word and image in medieval cartography is widely acknowledged, the significance of the relationship after the rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geography and throughout the Renaissance has been overlooked, despite Abraham Ortelius's choice of the term ‘Reader’ for users of the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570). In this paper, the map of the world, which (as in Ptolemy's Geography) opens Ortelius's Theatrum, is analysed to show how Ortelius's concept of space was very different from Ptolemy's. Attention is drawn to the content of the texts on the map, to Ortelius's notion of geography as the eye of history, and to the importance in the Renaissance of the emblem as a conceit, or device, in the system of acquisition and transmission of knowledge. As in emblems, the words on Ortelius's map are not there to explain or to comment on what is seen but to give the image meaning; the purpose of the map is to invite contemplation of God's world. The map is contradictory, however; for Ortelius's accurate and up‐to‐date presentation of the physical world is qualified by a verbal statement that the world is ‘nothing’, a mere pinpoint in the immensity of the universe. It is concluded that Ortelius was not a geographer in the same way Ptolemy was, and that Ortelius was using geography as a philosopher and his world map as an illustration of his moral and religious thinking.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

“复合族氏”铭文研究的一种新视角——以殷墟晚期“告”作有铭铜器为例

殷墟晚期铜器铭文多数较短,其中又以类似"亚某"、"寝某"等形式的短铭较多。以往的研究中多将这种形式的铭文归为"复合族氏铭文"。通过对殷墟晚期"告"作有铭铜器的梳理,我们认为这种形式铭文中的一部分可能不是"复合族氏铭文",而是"官职+私名"。这对认识殷墟晚期短铭金文的性质具有一定的启发作用。     

Believing in the USA: Derrida,Melville and the Great American Charlatan

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the relationship between the prophet and the charlatan, particularly as they figure in the contemporary American political landscape. It argues that at moments of democratic political crisis these figures arise and reveal the vacancy of sovereignty within the democratic model. The essay treats Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man along with Jacques Derrida’s writings on democracy and the apocalyptic tone as resources in this endeavor. It considers as well why recent worries over the status of facts in the era of “fake news” have led to critiques of deconstruction.     

Branding the United Nations: The Adoption of the UN Insignia and Flag, 1941–1950

Abstract

This article contends that the symbols of the United Nations (UN) have played a vital role in establishing the organization’s identity and in protecting its personnel. The design and usage of these emblems developed in a number of steps in the 1940s and early 1950s, a process dominated mainly by Americans. Although private admirers of the UN originated a number of serviceable and aesthetically pleasing designs, products mainly of their own self-initiative, the emblems chosen by the UN were prepared by professional designers, starting with an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) team operating under the aegis of the U.S. State Department. The author compares this process to product ‘branding’, and he also sees it as reflecting a longstanding claim to predominance in the internationalist project by technical specialists. In the 1940s, this dynamic revealed itself in rivalry between an elite of liberal internationalist technocrats and ‘populist internationalists’, the former coming to determine the character and choice of UN emblems. Members of the OSS design team had backgrounds in advertising and – not surprisingly – produced a logo-like design. The ultimate product of this process, a UN flag, was adopted in 1947, but it was treated by early UN bureaucrats like a protected trademark of the UN, at least until popular pressure-driven by an outpouring of mass emotion at the time of the Korean War – forced its release for broader public use.     

Antifascism,anticommunism, antipolitics: delegitimation in Berlusconi’s Italy

Abstract

Post-1994 delegitimizing discourses borrowed a lot from antifascism and anticommunism, which they updated to fit the new historical circumstances. Yet, with the events of 1992–94, the role, credibility, autonomy, and boundaries of the Italian political sphere entered a crisis, and this turned arguments about politics and antipolitics into new instruments of delegitimation. This article analyzes how delegitimizing traditions survived the end of the Cold War, and how they interacted with the new issues generated by Tangentopoli. Section 2 describes Berlusconi’s anticommunism, nurtured by the persistence of pre-1989 memories, but also by three present-oriented arguments: the fact that the communists had been able to survive the end of communism; their being professional politicians; and their statism. Section 3 deals with antiberlusconism, which is also composed of three threads: antifascism; the refusal of the ‘spirit of the Eighties’; and moralism. The final section of the article connects post-1994 delegitimizing discourses with the conflict between two opposed solutions to the crisis of the political, both fraught with contradictions: Berlusconi’s offer of less politics; and the conviction of the left that the correct answer was not less, but good politics.     

Two bullocks,a ladder and a lamp: electoral symbols in Nehruvian India

There is a substantial body of literature on nation‐building that, from a variety of theoretical approaches, examines the role of symbolic constructs in the process of construction and consolidation of new nation‐states. Among these works, the dramatic and symbolic aspects of election and their function in the nation‐building project have been investigated by political scientists and anthropologists alike. However, analysis of electoral emblems as constitutive elements in the nation‐building process has been largely missing from most studies of nation‐building and official nationalism. A case study of postindependence India suggests how national belonging was also made to hinge upon on competent democratic participation of the masses in the political life of the country. Central to this process of identity work was the establishment of an independent Election Commission and of strict rules for the design, selection and allotment of election emblems. Conventional accounts have argued that these procedures were introduced primarily for the benefit of the uneducated masses who were suddenly invited to participate in India's democratic process. I argue against this simplistic interpretation. Far from being only tools for the simplification of electoral processes, India's election symbols were one of India's institutional mechanisms designed to nurture the development of a correct democratic conduct and therefore ultimately contributing to the Nehruvian national project.     

The New Militia: War,Politics and Gender in 1750s Britain

This article explores the role of gender in the debates around the creation of a ‘New Militia’ at the beginning of the Seven Years War. The humiliating military defeats of 1756 had precipitated a cultural crisis that focused upon gender distinctions, as the ‘effeminacy’ of men and the ‘boldness’ of women threatened to collapse the social order. In this context, militia service was presented as a cure for the nation's moral, social, political and sexual ills. This article therefore examines a range of textual and visual sources in order to suggest that certain mid‐Georgian political worldviews were fundamentally gendered, since they were predicated upon martial masculine virtues of the citizenry.     

Finite Community: Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually explores, like Nancy, the political closure of immanence. Man’s distinguishing trait of perfectibility, which renders him finite, always open to change for better or worse, rejects the self-enclosure of immanence as does the constant willing of the general will which defines a community’s political life. If citizens could form an immanent whole, they would have nothing left to will, reaching an inhuman situation without liberty, reflection and responsibility. A community’s vitality, as Rousseau’s discussion of Poland suggests, does not come from closure to the outside but from openness to what potentially disrupts it. That openness, by raising the question of communal legitimacy, underlies the shared responsibility of citizens to ensure their free and equal coexistence. Rousseau’s theory, I conclude, thus supplements Nancy’s ontological reflection by considering the antagonism and struggles endured by ontic communities as they confront the chances and risks arising from their finitude.     

Wolfgang Streeck's conception of the crisis-phase of democratic politics: a post-Keynesian critique

Depictions of the politics of crisis in advanced societies (what crisis is and what can be done) continue to pit different strands of political science and heterodox political economy against each other. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck's contributions to these controversies have emphasised ‘embeddedness’, or the need for economies to incorporate non-functional or deliberated elements which allow functional and market-focused processes to play themselves out. Streeck's recent writings on debt-induced crisis nonetheless accept too much orthodox liberal disquiet: most fatefully, a contempt for politics based on what seems to be an untenable assertion – that rich societies have hit the limits of their capacity to increase taxation. Capitalism has entered an ‘end point’, he claims. This article presents, again, contrary evidence and offers suggestions for a revised heterodox understanding of capitalism's current malaise.     

Liberté, égalité, fraternité?: Views from the far‐right fringe in France (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The current financial, economic, social, and political crisis is widely thought to benefit far‐right parties in many European states. The Front National party, a fixture in French politics for more than two decades, achieved its best result ever in the 2012 presidential elections. This article explores far‐right voters’ accounts of their political life‐stories, analyzing the factors that trigger people's “conversions” to the right, and examining the ways in which this increasing, yet diverse minority views French history, society, and politics. Far‐right supporters legitimize their political convictions and actions in different ways. Some believe that they are part of a “resistance movement”, others draw on what they believe to be sociological or anthropological insights. Many pretend to advocate Republican ideals such as equality and freedom. Democracy stands to gain from drawing this growing part of the population back into mainstream debate, and social scientists may have a role to play in this effort.     

A rentier class? Milanese nobility and the economy in post-unification Italy

ABSTRACT

The Lombard nobility’s loss of political power after the Napoleonic Wars has led economic historians to overlook the persisting role of traditional elites in social and economic life. The aim of the paper is to reassess the contribution of the Milanese aristocracy to Italian economic development, providing new insights into the business behaviour of the nobility in northern Italian areas. The article presents some new findings on noblemen’s investments and enterprises related to agriculture, manufacturing, trade and banking. The research focuses on the decades following Italian political unification, a period in which noblemen increased their interest in the financial sector and joint-stock companies (transport, banking, new sectors and industries) as a result of the transformations induced by the Industrial Revolution and the agrarian crisis of the 1870s and 1880s. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be used to assess not only the number of individuals involved and the capital they invested in new ventures, but also their role in orienting, stimulating, managing or supporting entrepreneurial activities and their openness to collaboration with the members of the middle class. The analysis combines the deeds produced by four notaries, chosen on the basis of their contiguity to the Milanese aristocracy, the foundation’s deeds of the main companies established in the city, conserved in the House of Trade, and the information provided by other local and national institutions. The cross-referencing of this data suggests that the Milanese nobility maintained a prominent economic role well beyond Italian political unification, contributing to the modernization of the national economy despite the weaknesses and contradictions that marked this process.     

‘But Private Notes for My Own Memory’? Parliamentary Diaries,Parliamentary History and the Politics of Information in Early Stuart England*

Early modern parliamentary diaries are a standard source for historians, and have long been used as a supplement to the official journals in reconstructions of debates and business at Westminster. This article adopts a contrasting approach and examines what diaries – viewed as sources in their own right – reveal about parliament and its members, methods of contemporary note-taking, and the circulation and readership of political information. It begins with a review of the evidence for why, how, and to what ends members kept parliamentary diaries, before exploring the extent of their dissemination in early Stuart England. While recent literature has emphasized the circulation of materials relating to Jacobean and especially Caroline parliaments during the early 17th century, the article recovers the existence of a simultaneous interest in the parliamentary proceedings of the Elizabethan era. At a time when the future of parliament seemed uncertain, it argues that the evident market for, and readership of, Elizabethan material reflects contemporaries’ increasing recognition of parliament's significance within the English state and their changing attitudes towards parliamentary history. Moreover, while Elizabethan parliamentary diaries and journals seemingly reinforced memories of a past ‘golden age’ of parliamentary rule, the article contends that contemporaries’ production, dissemination, and reading of that material was a conscious form of political action in response to the constitutional crisis of their day.     

U.S. anti-abortion ideology on the move: Mobile crisis pregnancy centers as unruly,unmappable, and ungovernable

Crisis pregnancy centers—anti-abortion non-profits that masquerade as abortion clinics—are increasingly using mobile units to expand their geographical and political reach. In this article, the first to consider mobile crisis pregnancy centers, we examine the methodological, epistemological, and political challenges that mobile units raise for scholars and activists alike. The mobile nature of on-the-go crisis pregnancy centers makes them difficult to both map and regulate. Taking these challenges as a starting point, we reflect on what we learned from our failure to map mobile crisis pregnancy centers. We first outline how mobile crisis pregnancy centers—the epitome of the wild, ungovernable, and unruly—call into question the glorification of these concepts in feminist and queer studies. We also suggest that mobile crisis pregnancy centers trouble the possibility of thinking feminist and political geography separately, as well as the positive affects associated with mobility in discussions of reproductive mobilities. We close with a qualitative analysis of mobile crisis pregnancy centers’ online presence, examining the particular concerns that their mobility raises in terms of race, class, and place.     

Feared Rumours and Rumours of Fear: The Politicisation of Ethnicity During the Fiji Coup in May 2000

In this article I explore rumour and fear as crucial to the politicisation of ethnicity and the attempt of ethno‐nationalists to gain political hegemony during the coup in Fiji in May 2000. I discuss rumours during the Fiji crisis as emotional discourses articulating fears and anxieties that have influenced interethnic relations in Fiji since the indenture of Indian labour. I argue that these feelings of fear and insecurity are linked historically to issues of land, demography and race and investigate how the George Speight Team and Fijian ethno‐nationalists aimed at reinforcing and foregrounding these emotions to mobilise support. I also look at the role of rumours and fear in the silencing of dissent and opposing voices. I ask how rumours were in dialogue with other discourses circulating at the height of the crisis and how they complemented ethno‐nationalist political strategies. I suggest that part of the political success of the George Speight Team stems from their effective engagement of different local, national and global levels to reinforce an old discourse of ethnic Fijian unity and fear of Indo‐Fijian colonisation around which they mobilised ethnically based political support. The effect of this ‘indigenous articulation’ was a polarisation of Fijian and Indo‐Fijian positionings in the nation.     

From Democracy to Bureaucracy： The Baojia in Nationalist Thought and Practice, 1927-1949

In the 1939 New County Reforms, the Nationalist government made the baojia system the lowest level of self-government in the country. This decision was the result of more than ten years of discussion among Nationalist administrators and writers who were searching for a tutelary system to train the people in their political rights in preparation for constitutional rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nationalist writers claimed to be following Sun Zhongshan＇s （Sun Yat-sen） philosophy by reinventing the baojia as a form of democracy. Harkening back to a reimagined national past, they ＂discovered＂ that the imperial baojia was not a system of local control, but a traditional model of bureaucratically-designed local self-government. Nationalist writers dovetailed this new baojia with Sun Zhongshan＇s philosophy in order to rationalize its position as the foundation of the Three Principles of the People State. Once philosophically legitimized, Nationalist writers endorsed the baojia as a top-down bureaucratic system that would transform the political, social, and economic life of the country; it would become the core political unit of their state-making and nation-building projects. In so doing, the baojia came to represent the Nationalists＇ deeply-held belief in the power of human agency to create state institutions capable of entirely remaking society and transforming the nation.