The commentariat and discourse failure: language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of 'terrorism', which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the 'root causes' that give rise to the politics of com placency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the fi rst tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away.     

PRESELI DOLERITE BLUESTONES: AXE-HEADS, STONEHENGE MONOLITHS, AND OUTCROP SOURCES

Summary.   Chemical compositions and magnetic susceptibility data were compared for 12 dolerite bluestone implements including axes, axe-hammers and battle-axes, 11 Stonehenge monoliths (chemical data only), and potential source outcrops in Preseli, South Wales. Most of the studied artefacts are of spotted dolerite, a small number being unspotted dolerite. Bivariate graphs, discriminant analysis and t-tests were used singly and in combination to show, respectively, that the implements found at sites in England are mainly similar to Stonehenge monoliths, while the implements found in Wales have a variety of compositions and are much less similar to Stonehenge monoliths. The dichotomy between English and Welsh dolerite bluestone implements could be explained by exploitation of different Preseli outcrops or erratic assemblages derived from them. A small number of spotted dolerite implements have previously been shown to have chemical compositions atypical of and marginal to Preseli, suggesting the possibility of a source of spotted dolerite outside Preseli. Previously published analytical data in combination with the new implement/outcrop comparisons presented in this paper support derivation of the majority of analysed Stonehenge monoliths at one particular outcrop within the group of four identified by Thorpe et al. 15 years ago. Analysis of all the extant bluestone monoliths at Stonehenge (now possible using non-destructive methods) would allow progress in identifying monolith outcrop sources, and in understanding the links with the bluestone axe trade.     

Security and democracy: the ASEAN charter and the dilemmas of regionalism in South‐East Asia

In November 2007, the heads of the ten member governments of the Association of South‐East Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a charter that will, once ratified, give the association a legal personality. The charter, significantly, requires more of its members than a reassertion of the traditional ASEAN norm of non‐interference and the practice of consensus. The charter lists a number of novel goals among the organization's purposes: ‘to strengthen democracy, enhance good governance and the rule of law, and to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.’ In view of the wide economic and political disparities between the member states of ASEAN, this article examines whether strengthening democracy would in fact facilitate ASEAN's goal of becoming an integrated political, economic and security community. Rather than enhancing an integrated community, democratization would arguably create a faultline between the more politically mature and economically developed states and a northern tier of less developed, authoritarian single‐party dominant regimes in South‐East Asia. Moreover, given China's emerging political and economic importance to the region, such a strategy would, as if by an invisible hand, draw the more authoritarian ASEAN states into China's less than democratic embrace. This article concludes that rather than strengthening democracy, ASEAN's charter needs urgently to reinforce practices of rule governance and mechanisms of market integration to enhance both ASEAN's economic profile as well as the region's autonomy.     

From Utopia to reality: Plaid Cymru and Europe†

ABSTRACT. This paper traces the evolution of Plaid Cymru's attitude towards Europe. It does so by focusing in turn on: the place of Europe in the ideas of Saunders Lewis, the dominant figure in the party between its foundation in 1924/25 and 1945; the more ‘northern’ or Nordic vision of Europe that gripped the party in the post ‐ World War II era; and the waxing and waning of the party's most EU‐enthusiastic phase between the mid ‐ 1980s and the present day. By adopting a longer timeframe than is normally the case, the paper argues that Europe has played a wider role in the thinking of the party than is often conceded; a role that was not at all or only tangentially related to actually existing institutions. The paper goes on to argue that it was in part the chastening impact of Plaid Cymru's eventual exposure to actually existing European institutions that led the party in 2003 to abandon its utopian commitment to a post‐sovereign Europe in favour of an explicit commitment to ‘independence’ as its long‐term aim.     

MAGNETIC SUSCEPTIBILITY VARIATIONS AT MONS CLAUDIANUS AND IN ROMAN COLUMNS: A METHOD OF PROVENANCING TO WITHIN A SINGLE QUARRY

Mons Claudianus in the Eastern Desert of Egypt was an important source of granodiorite for Roman columns. Computer contouring of 1119 magnetic susceptibility measurements at the quarry shows systematic variations, with low readings in the west of the quarry area and higher readings in the east. One hundred and seventy measurements on 62 columns of Mons Claudianus type in Rome and its environs were compared with the quarry readings, using a t-test based procedure. Some columns with distinctively low or high magnetic susceptibility could be provenanced very precisely to areas of about 700 × 700m within the 9km² of Mons Claudianus. Columns with susceptibility in the middle of the Mons Claudianus range could not be provenanced precisely. Results indicate early (first century AD) use of both west and east parts of Mons Claudianus, and contemporaneous use of several parts of the quarry, rather than systematic or sequential opening of the area. Columns found in third-century AD monuments, provenanced to the same parts of Mons Claudianus as earlier material, may indicate reuse of columns in some monuments. Magnetic susceptibility constitutes a portable and non-destructive method capable of provenancing not only to a quarry, but to specific areas within a single quarry.