‘Rocking the nation’: the popular culture of neo‐nationalism

The aim of this paper is to understand contemporary forms of nationalism in a socio‐political context in which neo‐nationalism has obtained a dominant role not just in politics but in public discourse and in the cultural field as well. It investigates the emergence of a particular music scene in the beginning of the 21^st century, shaped by rock bands and performers and supported by far‐right political actors, which has made the ‘national’ imagination emotionally and ideologically appealing to a considerable part of Hungarian society and first of all to young people.     

‘A Rather Novel Constitutional Experiment’: The Formation of the 1977–8 ‘Lib‐Lab Pact’

By March 1977, the Labour government which had narrowly been re‐elected in the October 1974 election, had lost its parliamentary majority, and was facing a vote of confidence tabled by the Conservative opposition. Senior Labour figures thus desperately sought to secure support from one of the minor parties. Unable to broker a deal with either the Ulster Unionists or the Scottish National Party (SNP), largely due to ideological differences, the Labour leadership entered into negotiations with the Liberal leader, David Steel. The result was that the Liberal Party agreed to provide the Labour government with parliamentary support, in return for consultation, via a joint committee, over future policies, coupled with the reintroduction of devolution legislation, and a pledge to provide for direct elections for the European parliament (ideally using some form of proportional representation). There was some surprise that Steel had not pressed for more, or stronger, policy commitments or concessions from the Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, but Steel was thinking long term; he envisaged that Liberal participation in the joint consultative committee would foster closer co‐operation between Liberals and Labour moderates/social democrats, and eventually facilitate a realignment of British politics by marginalising both the Labour left, and the increasingly right‐wing Conservatives Party.     

The movement against illegal immigration: analysis of the central node in the Russian extreme‐right movement

ABSTRACT. The goal of this article is to analyse the political communication style of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (Dvizheniye Protiv Nelegalnoy Immigrazii – DPNI), which is one of the central nodes in the Russian extreme‐right movement web network. In the article, the political communication style of the organisation is investigated at two levels – the presentation of online identity and the presentation of offline identity. Online self‐presentation is studied by means of the qualitative analysis of the incoming links (position in the web network) and the internal structure of the website. DPNI is conceptualised as a new type of political organisation based on the networking principle allowing flexible membership and based on the interplay of its online and offline self‐presentations. The study provides insights into how the new media become embedded in the political communication of extreme‐right political organisations in Russia.     

‘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.     

Being ‘there’: At the front line of the ‘European refugee crisis’ ‐ part 2

In the course of 2015, Skala Sykamnias, a fishing village and tourist idyll on the northern coast of Lesbos, by accident of its geographical location, became the informal gate into Europe for more than 200.000 refugees. In this article the author analyzes the massive flows of people and things that transverse his fieldwork site from different directions: the great diversity of actors enacting what are often dissonant ideals and strategies; the various theatres of operation and reception ‘structures’; both frontline and back stage; and the debates that revolve around humanitarian action in the region. The local community is falling apart whilst to those incoming it represents a gateway to freedom. It is becoming a mini theatre of conflicts that echo wider debates on the political future of Europe.     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

‘Shew Yourselves as Men’: Gender,Citizenship and Political Propaganda in the 1773 and 1774 Worcester Election Contests

This case study of the 1773 and 1774 election contests in the city of Worcester investigates how members of the local oligarchy, and the political opposition to that oligarchy, drew on contemporary discourses on citizenship to convince the electorate that their candidate would become a worthy representative of their city in parliament, and to refute the claims of their opponents. Since independence was absolutely essential to the voters’ identities as male householder citizens, this became the main issue of conflict. The candidate of the opposition interest, Sir Watkin Lewes, sought to establish himself as the guardian of the independence of the citizens of Worcester against the corrupt corporation. The candidates of the corporation, Thomas Bates Rous and his successor, Colonel Nicholas Lechmere, instead claimed that Lewes was the real threat, as his anti‐corruption campaign deprived the voters of the usual fruits of the election. While such claims also entailed an appeal by the local elite to the financial interest of the voters, the need to justify this incentive ideologically, and the high portion of voters who turned their backs on their patrons, does suggest the power embedded in the concept of citizenship in the political life at the level of the localities. Gendered and classed conceptions of citizenship, furthermore, were employed as offensive weapons in the political propaganda surrounding the elections, as each faction sought to discredit the other by claiming that they were neither manly enough, nor of the proper social status, to qualify as worthy political subjects. Thus, citizenship was not only fundamentally gendered in the masculine, but also highly hierarchical and equally intertwined with contemporary notions of class.     

‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party

In this article I will analyse the role of antisemitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in‐group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). The analysis will show that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right‐wing parties in Europe, utilises various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimise political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimising strategies used by the FPÖ when criticised involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent antisemitism and forms of post‐Nazi antisemitism. I will focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalisation of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry.     

Fleshing out the geographies of social movements: Colombia's Pacific coast black communities and the ‘aquatic space’

The intersections between the concepts of space, place and resistance have recently received increasing attention from geographers dedicated to the study of social movements. Space and place are not merely seen as providing a physical background for mobilisations but as mutually constitutive of social movement agency. Yet, critics of theoretical frameworks drawn up by geographers have often rightly pointed to the lack of convincing empirical evidence presented in their support.This paper addresses these critiques by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded account of recent mobilisations by the social movement of black communities in the Pacific coast region of Colombia. Drawing on both the objective aspects of place and the subjective feelings that are derived from living in a place, I will show how these mechanisms have impacted on the specific spatial organising forms adopted by black communities. In particular, I will propose the concept of ‘aquatic space’ as a set of spatialised social relationships among Afro-Colombians, and show how these concrete everyday geographies have been drawn upon by black communities in the establishment of community councils along river basins.The paper argues that to make a strong point for more spatially sensitive analyses of social movements, geographers have to sustain their theoretical frameworks with concrete empirical data that not only illustrate spatial processes at play, but also convincingly demonstrate their very embeddedness in social practice. I thus argue for a strong consideration of ethnographies as a privileged research methodology to flesh out the geographies of social movements.     

Property and ‘publicness’: bishops and lay‐founded churches in post‐Roman Hispania

Accounts of how the church fits into broader narratives of socio‐economic change have been confused by two different issues: an unsystematic application of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ to various phenomena, and a separate tendency to elide the ‘public’ with the state. Visigothic thought on lay‐founded churches shows that the legal regime around ecclesiastical properties did not aim at simply enhancing episcopal power. Laypeople had important responsibilities and powers, especially in resisting bishops’ capacities for ‘private’ appropriation of donated property. There existed a sense of communal concern for church property, which was thought of as ‘public’ without reference to the state.     

Penetrating the ‘black‐box’ of ‘remembrance day’ playlist: bereavement and the induction mechanisms of glocalization – a study in cultural sociology

This article examines the musical repertoire broadcast on Israeli state radio stations on Remembrance Day. Commencing with the first Remembrance Day, Israeli radio stations have refrained from broadcasting songs that do not contribute to the glorification of the military mythology or failure to reinforce the consensual perception of national loss. In view of globalization – it might be assumed that Remembrance Day songs would undergo changes in tune with the times. From a musical point of view, new songs that belong to what Regev and Seroussi classify as ‘globalizing Israel’ penetrated into the nationalist arena. But, following Inglehart and Baker, these songs, despite their seemingly secular façade, remain limited hegemonic enclosures organized around the core of founding values. Apparently, this is an example of the process of glocalization of culture. The article seeks answers to the strategies employed to accommodate these new songs to the traditional ideology of the classical Remembrance Day songs and examines whether the mechanisms of legitimacy that enable the inclusion of new voices on Remembrance Day, can be identified. We argue that their choice is not arbitrary and that they illustrate the manner by which voluntary cultural entrepreneurs (musical editors) are co‐opted in the postnational condition.     

‘Material support’: US anti‐terrorism law threatens human rights and academic freedom

A US federal law prohibiting the provision of “material support” or resources to terrorist groups has broad implications for anthropologists and other academics working with groups who may be designated as terrorists and the populations that support them or live under their influence. The broad scope and vague language of the law raises the possibility that individuals engaging in some forms of humanitarian aid, charitable giving, peace‐building or academic activities could be prosecuted for offering material aid to terrorists. Problems with the material support law are critically examined as are the dangers faced by anthropologists whose ordinary research, writing and speaking activities might be seen as violating the law. Historical context and the chilling effect on anthropological research and analysis are considered.     

John Breuilly: ‘Eric Hobsbawm: nationalism and revolution’

This article considers how Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) connected the concepts of revolution and nationalism, analysing this in relation to his biography, his politics and his work as a professional historian. It traces major changes in Hobsbawm's understanding of revolution and nationalism as he, the political world and the ways of writing history all changed over the course of his long life.     

The ‘woman‐in‐conflict’ at the UN Security Council: a subject of practice

Since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the woman‐in‐conflict has emerged as a central figure in the discourse of the UNSC Women, Peace and Security policy community. She is an ever‐present referent in discussions, the person in whose name critique is launched or action demanded. This figure is a representation of the needs and interests of the uncountable, faceless and nameless women affected by and living through war; a representation that takes place through imbuing her with particular meaning or characteristics. These meanings shape how the figure is understood in Women, Peace and Security discourse, which, in turn, constructs the horizons of possibility for both current and future policy and its implementation. This article explores how this figure is produced as a subject through layers of representation and is deeply embedded in the practices and relationships of power in the policy community. It suggests that accounting for these will offer an opportunity for feminist advocates to engage in this institutional space in more considered and effective ways.     

‘Beer and Britannia’: public‐house culture and the construction of nineteenth‐century British‐Welsh industrial identity

Prior to industrialisation, there was a nebulous and fragmented Welsh national character or mass collective identity. Industrialisation engendered significant sociocultural upheaval and change, and for this ‘new’ society to function effectively a cohesive Welsh identity had to emerge. Because the impetus behind industrialisation had occurred primarily in a British context, any newly formed Welsh identity would ultimately have to be reconciled to the nation's industrial import within a ‘United Kingdom’. Mass cultural commonalities and the role played by leisure in this procedure is a core element in the establishment of industrial modernist nation‐states. Therefore, this article argues that public‐house culture played a central role in the construction of a new industrial Welsh national ideology that was ultimately allied to, and a constituent of, a British imperial agenda designed to exploit both the natural resources and workforce of the area to its maximum extent.