Recent research into revivalist movements in Finland

The introductory essay contrasts the violent 1968 uprisings in Paris, Berlin, New York and other cities with the comparatively low‐key ways of the revolt or radicalization in the Scandinavian countries, brought about by the attitude of radicals and authorities alike. It is argued that whereas the level of violence was low in Scandinavia, the effects of ‘1968’ have been at least as far‐reaching as in other Western countries, where sixties radicals were less easily co‐opted into mainstream society and polity. Another distinguishing trait of the Scandinavian ‘1968’ is the role of socialism, and especially Leninism. The essay summarizes the content of the articles in the Special Issue. On the basis of the four country overviews it is noticed that there is still some way to go before the movement from memory to history is completed. The articles in this Special Issue are evidence of the progress, however, and represent a milestone on the road to maturity of research on the sixties radicalization in Scandinavia.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

‘Angelic Spirits of ‘68’: Memories of 60s’ Radicalism in Responses to the 2010–11 UK Student Protests

The winter of 2010–11 saw a significant upsurge of student protest in Britain. This paper analyses the numerous references to 60s’ radicalism which circulated in responses to the protests, with a focus on left-wing media. Drawing on performativity theory, the paper traces the highly polarised divisions between affirmations and repudiations of ‘1968’ in responses to the protests. This polarisation, I argue, reflects an absence of a clear-cut collective memory of the British radical 60s. More broadly, the paper sheds light on the hitherto under-explored mechanisms through which memories of ‘1968’ shape the discursive and affective landscape of contemporary radical politics.     

THE SCANDINAVIAN 1968 IN A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

The article compares the events of 1968 in Scandinavia, pointing to the differences and similarities between the Scandinavian countries as well as comparing Scandinavia to the rest of Europe. Within Scandinavia, Norway and Sweden present a Scandinavian model with focus on conflicts between centre and periphery, Maoism and a low level of conflict. In Denmark, the student movement and theoretical Marxism dominated the scene. However, the political context of the three countries and the interplay between mainstream politics and 1968 were rather similar. In Finland, both the political context as well as the movement developed quite differently. The article concludes that the high level of integration of the protest movements makes Scandinavia stand out compared to continental Europe.     

Freedom and Progress: The Dilemma of Southern Republican Thought during Radical Reconstruction

The failure of the Republican Party in the South to appeal to the white yeomanry has been a recurring puzzle in the historiography of Reconstruction. Acknowledging the important role of white resistance, racism, and economic depression, this essay instead locates the roots of its failure in its ideology. It argues that the southern Republican appeal to the yeomanry was inherently weakened by yoking together Whiggish appeals of economic development with the class appeals of Jacksonian Democracy. The coupling of these clashing tendencies brought to the surface the latent conflicts of Jacksonian politics in the South, driving still another wedge into the southern Republican coalition.     

Commentary: In the shadow of liberalism? Comments on Neil Smith's “The Endgame of Globalization”

In this commentary, I respond to Neil Smith's essay “The Endgame of Globalization.” Smith's analysis of the three rounds of U.S. administrations' attempts to complete a project of global economic dominance and the recurrent nationalism that undermines such a project is an important and insightful contribution to understanding the workings of American imperialism and current national politics. However, I argue that his critique of liberalism and theorization of globalization in this essay are weakened by, on the one hand, a narrow definition of liberalism and a failure to address some key philosophical and political questions that arise as a result of its critique, and, on the other, a notion of power that obscures the paradoxical nature of globalization and the centrality of gender and other markers of difference to its operation. In line with critical feminist and postcolonial scholarship, I suggest that important theoretical insight is lost by neglecting conflicting accounts of liberalism, neoliberalism and globalization from alternative perspectives.     

Urban atmospheres of terror

This essay advances an affective agenda in urban geopolitics that studies the everyday felt experience of urban terrorism. It takes as examples the relations between the spatial politics and affective atmospheres of Place de la République (Paris) and Place de la Bourse/Beursplein (Brussels) in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Intersecting feminist geopolitics and non-representational geographies, the essay bridges geographical studies of experience and affective atmospheres with experiential accounts in urban geopolitics. It argues for a renewed conceptual engagement and scholarly focus on the affective dimensions of urban geopolitics and security, that highlights the contested and unequal topographies of everyday experience in the aftermath of terrorism in urban Europe.     

Movement in Print: Migrations and Political Articulations in Grassroots Publishing

What makes a book political? This essay takes up this question through analysis of a small network of grassroots publishing projects. In doing so, I suggest that the materiality and mobility of a book can be just as, if not more, significant than its content when considering its political character. Specifically, I examine the interconnected trajectories of a cluster of books published since 2010 that participate in conversations about migration, work, and popular politics in Argentina and Bolivia. By zooming in on two very distinct contexts of book culture (Buenos Aires and La Paz) and especially the connections and tensions that emerge between them, I seek to account for some of the heterogeneous contemporary formations of what Ángel Rama called the ‘lettered city’ in Latin America. As I focus on grassroots publishing projects, I shift my attention away from the usual spaces of book culture, allowing other marginal circuits of production, circulation, and consumption to appear. Combining ethnographic narrative with textual analysis, this essay develops the double concept of political articulation (as expression and connection) to offer a transdisciplinary exploration of how movement is shaping the print book – materially and politically – in Latin America today.     

Fashion,the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre–Fascist and Fascist Italy

The essay offers an analysis of fashion and its bearing on the construction of national identity and politics of style during fascism in Italy. No recent work on fascism has analysed the role of fashion in the complex and contradictory phases of the cultural politics of Mussolini’s regime. The essay aims to illustrate the two sides of fashion and their relevance to the period in question. It shows, on the one hand, how the regime used fashion to discipline the social body, especially women’s, and to create a national style recognisable as such; and, on the other, how fashion is also an individual act through which was expressed the creativity both of the people working in the fashion industry and of ordinary people who used fashion and style to demonstrate their non–conformity with the diktats of the regime. Pointing out that it was as a result of the debate on nationalism of the pre–fascist liberal period that premises for fascist policy were set, the essay argues that the history of fascist fashion policy is one of continuities rather than ruptures.     

L'écologisme français entre présent évanescent et avenir incertain

This article reviews the factors determining whether the ecology movement in France has been a success or a failure. Broadly speaking the French ecology move ment - l'écologisme français - came into existence to fulfil a dual ambition. First, through its incursion into the political arena - an incursion initially thought of as temporary - its purpose was to force other political parties and public bodies to pay greater attention to environmental issues. Second, in the swirl of ideas following May 1968, its ambition was to become a 'politics of the future': among other things, it would strive to displace the other parties and undermine or redefine the traditional divide between the Left and Right. These and other concerns are analysed in order to assess what role 'ecologism' plays in France today. This article is based on the author's latest book, L'introuvable écologisme français (PUF, 2000).     

Electoral instability and the modern campaign: New Zealand labour in 1987

This essay explores the theme of the rise of the ‘modern campaign'—the electoral focus on polling, targeted appeals, and the professional, managed use of the media—as the strategic response by parties to the exigencies of electioneering in an era of increasingly fluid, weakly partisan electorates. Given New Zealand Labour's unparalleled policy‐reversals since 1984, which rocked a political system noted for its stable, loyal partisan politics, it is argued the 1987 campaign constitutes a threshold election in which Labour's executive consciously embraced the modern campaign to deflect reactions to its unorthodox policies, and to allow appeals to newly heterogeneous bases of electoral support. Interviews with key figures in New Zealand's Labour and National parlies afford the chance to examine this strategic tactic as a considered response to electoral uncertainty.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

Framed Memories: The Politics of Recollection in Mana Neyestani’s An Iranian Metamorphosis

This essay examines the graphic memoir An Iranian Metamorphosis, by the acclaimed cartoonist Mana Neyestani, in the context of Iranian diaspora literature, particularly the genre of comics. Neyestani’s book is analyzed for its engagement with the politics of exile literature, and its attempt at challenging a two-dimensional view of the political discourse, in which the ethical boundaries of pro- and anti-government are overtly simple. The essay focuses on the book’s narrative techniques that exhibit a complex awareness of what is anticipated from a representative work of Iranian exile memoir, and the way it negotiates its own narrative politics. To clarify the arguments, several comparative examples are drawn from two well-known graphic narratives by Iranian diaspora authors, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Amir and Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise.     

Identity and social solidarity: an ignored connection. A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations

The article comments on the ongoing de‐Europeanisation and re‐nationalisation of Europe from a historical perspective. The article argues that the building of national community from the 1870s onwards focused on the problem of social integration where the development of emotional feelings of belonging and solidarity was linked to the building of institutions for social politics in mutually reinforcing dynamics. The social question emerged in the wake of the spread of industrial capitalism. Its role is underexplored in the study of the building of national and European communities. The social question draws attention to the institutional capacity of nation states rather than nations based on emotions. Nationalism did not only mean the building of friend‐ enemy distinctions through ethnicity but also national socialism as a conservative reform strategy against class struggle socialism. This contention between two approaches to the problem of social integration moulded together national communities through emotions and institutions without deploying the concept of identity. The article outlines this development, culminating in the (West) European welfare states as nation– states in the strong sense of the merger of these two terms, and how it came to an end in the 1970s when a reverse development began towards social disintegration at the end accompanied by accelerating nationalism and xenophobia. The identity concept was mobilised in 1973 as a tool in the European integration project to compensate for the erosion of social institutions by means of emotions. It was taken over and politicised from having been a technical term in mathematics and psychoanalysis. The politicisation of the identity concept was an indication of a deep identity crisis in Europe and its nations. The identity therapy failed, and the identity crisis remains, accompanied by an ever louder nationalistic and xenophobic vocabulary. Emotions replace institutions. The methodological focus of the article is on the semantics around key concepts such as social politics, solidarity and identity in their historical context as forward‐looking and action‐oriented concepts in the construction of community. This approach with a focus on past futures is an alternative to the application of the retrospective analytical concepts of ethnic and civic nationalism outlining present pasts.     

‘High Politics’ and its Intellectual Contexts*

Recent interest in the historiography of ‘high politics’ has centred mainly on historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s, above all Maurice Cowling. Less attention has been paid to the modified agendas pursued by the next generation of scholars. This essay explores some pioneering attempts to make sense of the structural relationships between 19th‐century British ‘high politics’ and its ‘intellectual’ contexts, focusing on a cluster of seminal 1980s studies by the historians Michael Bentley, Richard Brent, Boyd Hilton, and Jonathan Parry. Together, these works demanded a fundamental rethinking of how Victorian politics operated.     

Dijon in May 1968: Local Politics,the Spectre of Anarchy and the ‘Silent Majority’

This article provides an account of the municipal by-election held in Dijon during May 1968 following the death of its long-time mayor, le chanoine Kir. The chief candidate to replace him was the Gaullist Robert Poujade, secretary-general of the UDVe at national level. Drawing on local sources, including speeches made at the time and reports from the local press, the article analyses the rhetoric of local politics as it shifted ground under the pressure of the national crisis, and explores the experience of May 1968 from a perspective often sidelined in dominant narratives of the events: provincial France and those opposed to the movement rather than those who participated in it.     

Elite Analysis of Democracies' International Policy Introduction

This essay offers a critical appreciation of Mark Lilla's Stillborn God. To his credit, Lilla understands the primacy and enduring appeal of political theology, as well as the danger of intellectual complacency about the underlying principles of modern politics. Lilla maintains that modern politics is a relatively recent and radically novel experiment that aims at nothing less than displacing a primordial and perennial way of constituting politics with reference to the divine. My essay compares Lilla's analysis of the fundamental antagonism between political theology and modern liberal politics to Strauss's analysis of the theological-political problem. In doing so, I bring to light both the strengths and limits of Lilla's attempt to clarify the relationship between politics, biblical religion, and philosophic rationalism.     

Democracy,Equity and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Subcontinent

This article addresses the relationship between democracy, equity and common property resource management in South Asia, both at the national and at the local level. Its substantive focus will be largely on forests, and its geographical concentration mostly on India, although other sectors (primarily water) and areas (Nepal and Bangladesh) will also be included. The article opens by looking at Garrett Hardin's (1968) three strategies to preserve the commons. It finds that democratic politics is compatible with both privatization and centralization as conserving strategies (although not necessarily successful). With the third approach—local control—democracy has at best a problematic relationship, for where governmental units are the relevant actors, there tends to be more interest in consuming than in conserving or preserving resources at the local level. Local user groups, however, do much better at common property resource management, because they can restrict membership and thus avoid free riders, and they can establish a close linkage in their members' minds between benefits and costs of participating in group discipline to maintain the resource.     

Identity Politics: The Elephant in the Room at the Cape York Institute's Inaugural Conference

The Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership is dedicated to research and policy advice relevant to the remote Aboriginal communities of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Its inaugural conference, entitled ‘Strong Foundations: Rebuilding Social Norms in Indigenous Communities’, addressed widespread problems of social dysfunction that manifest in failure to attend school, substance abuse and sexual violence. Keynote addresses explained the dysfunction as an outcome of dependency on welfare, disincentives to work, poor governance and dispossession. They made a number of worthwhile proposals, including governmental intervention, recognition of shared Australian-ness and humanity, abandonment of victimhood and cultural security. However, they made only tangential allusion to Aboriginal identity politics, which I argue play a crucial role in constituting the dysfunction and, if understood, open new avenues to Aboriginal development. This essay constitutes a plea for more rigorous examination of the politics that present such a barrier to Aboriginal development.