'Our Spanish Brothers' or 'As at Plombieres'? France, The Legacy of Resistance and the Spanish Opposition to Franco, 1945-1948

The case of French relations with the semi-Fascist regime ofGeneral Francisco Franco of Spain after the Second World Waroffers historians the opportunity to explore various influenceson French foreign policy. This article examines France’sofficial policies towards the Spanish anti-Franco oppositionas an example of the impact that the legacy of the Resistancehad on postwar foreign affairs. Yet the French Foreign Ministryonly reluctantly embraced the Resistance vision of universalrepublicanism in Europe. Rather, the importance of keeping Frenchpolicy in line with that of the Western Alliance consistentlyshaped policy towards various Spanish groups. The result wasa significant Franco-American-British effort to unite the anti-Francoopposition in Spain 1945–1948 but one that was easilyabandoned once it proved impracticable. Resistance ideas ofa renewed foreign policy following liberation were thus limitedby the importance the government attributed to alliance politicsin the emerging Cold War atmosphere.     

Sarah and Her Sisters: Letters,Emotions, and Colonial Identities in the Early Modern Atlantic World

This article uses letters by indigenous converts to explore how early modern Moravian missions in the Atlantic imagined themselves as emotional communities. Moravian missions were the most successful Protestant mission enterprise in the Atlantic and established numerous missions across several empires and vastly different indigenous cultures. By comparing the letters from indigenous converts across the Atlantic rim (North America, Caribbean and Greenland) I argue that indigenous people used the medium of the written letter to participate in an imagined emotional community of Moravians while at the same time they negotiated inescapable social and gendered differences in very specific colonial contexts.     

Martin Luther in Nineteenth‐Century France

French‐language readers had little available about Martin Luther before the French Revolution. A few Catholic authors had written about him from a confessional perspective. At the beginning of the nineteenth century interest was aroused by an essay competition, but the topic had to do with political influence rather than with Luther's life. In 1835 there began a series of publications which addressed the life of the reformer, and included vast amounts of quoted material from the letters and table talk. One of these early works, by Michelet, was from a Romantic but nonsectarian perspective, that by Merle was Romantic and providential, while another by Audin was from an arch‐Catholic point of view. Over the course of the century both Catholics and Protestants continued to write essays about Luther, from confessional points of view, but there was a growth of works which achieved a greater degree of non‐partisanship, even if appreciative of his contributions. Toward the end of the century there was a treatment of Luther which recognised explicitly that he belonged to a bygone era which was increasingly inaccessible to contemporary French readers.     

Open Concepts as Crystallization Points and Enablers of Discursive Configurations: The Case of the Innovation Campus in the Netherlands

In this paper, we reflect on the role of concepts in spatial planning as reproductive devices of discursive configurations. In contrast to instrumentalist interpretations of spatial concepts, we start from the idea that spatial planning concepts are inherently political. Building on post-structuralist strands of thought, we discuss the theoretical concepts of “empty signifier” and “master signifier” and instead, after analysis, put forward “open concepts”, in order to grasp the richness of meanings and functions of seemingly vague concepts. This manoeuvre allows us to analyse the trajectory and performance of the spatial concept of the “innovation campus” in the Netherlands. This, in turn, opens the door to an analysis of planning concepts as crystallization points and enablers of discursive configurations. The Dutch innovation campus is shown to be a result of a confluence of various national and international discourses, an open concept, flexible enough to enable the continuation of the planning game within the familiar set of coordinates. Because of the particular set of expectations associated with the innovation campus, promising structural change, it is bound to produce disappointment.     

European Corridors as Carriers of Dynamic Agglomeration Externalities?

Transport corridors are viewed as a promising way forward in European Union (EU) transport policy, assumed to contribute positively to regional economic development. However, the validity of this assumption is not evident. The aim of this paper is to empirically test whether agglomeration economies in European transport corridor regions are positively related to indicators of regional economic development compared to regions outside the scope of corridors. The results build on the notion that the type of agglomeration economy in combination with the structure of the economy matters for prospects of structural economic growth in different regions. In this way, the analysis not only contributes to enhancing the empirical scrutiny of the corridor concept in EU transport policy, but also provides new insights into how corridors contribute to regional economic growth. We find only limited evidence for a corridor effect across European regions on productivity and employment growth externalities. Instead, we find a large degree of spatial heterogeneity interacting with corridors—a heterogeneity that has been little recognized in EU policies. We suggest that recent attention to place-based development strategies may accord well with the kinds of agglomeration effects related to corridor development observed in this study.