An Exceptional Response? Security,Development and Civil Society in Spanish Policy after 11‐M

This article considers the ways in which Spanish state institutions responded to the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004 in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’. It examines three inter‐related arenas of Spanish policy after 9/11 in which security and civil society are invoked in ways that impact upon the country's development agenda toward its southern Mediterranean partners. The first relates to Spain's external relations with its North African neighbours, and in particular the place of migration in shaping these relations over the last decade. The second concerns Spain's political relations with the representative organizations of its own Muslim populations. A third area of analysis pertains to the juridical‐institutional reactions of the state to the 11 March attacks: how have public authorities and civil society been affected and refashioned in the face of jihadist terrorism on the peninsula? The author argues that in each of these domains, the post‐9/11 context generally, and the 11 March attacks in particular, have elicited a securitization of civil society, which has in turn been associated with the country's international relations and domestic politics. Such securitization, however, has only been partially successful, thus vindicating the continuation of ‘politics as usual’ among Spain's state officials and its civil society.     

Identity and borders: seventeenth-century Hungarian travellers in the West and the East

The survey discusses the identity and self-image of seventeenth-century Hungarian and Transylvanian travellers as conveyed through their travel texts. The cultural borders in the mental map of the travellers coincided with the eastern and south-eastern borders of Transylvania. They placed themselves in the same position as their Western European contemporaries. Although the general tone of their diaries was one of admiration, they did not make explicit comparisons to the disadvantages of their home. There are also some cases of criticism on a civilisational basis towards the West, which shows that the travellers felt that they were on equal grounds to the West. The few cases of auto-stereotypes also show that some travellers tended to reinforce even the negative stereotypes attributed to Hungarians in order to question the Western discourse which placed them on a lower grade on a scale of civilisation. Towards their Eastern neighbours, the travellers tended to use a condescending tone: qualities such as boorishness, lack of education and barbarity were attributed to Russians, Wallachians and Moldavians. The worst reputation belonged to the Ottomans: in their case, even if – in a very few cases – tolerance and understanding came into picture, there was no possibility of acceptance. Hungarian travellers only used the discourse of their own inferiority towards Western Europeans when it was a part of their political agenda – otherwise, they included themselves in the concept of the region, imagined on the basis of erudition and Latin education – which they more and more often called Europe.     

The Ubiquity of Rhetoric and Hermeneutic Philosophy

This essay examines how hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Gadamer's, recovers rhetoric, less as the art of speaking well than as a statement of a truth of the sensus communis, that which communicates veracious content through argumentation. This is the sense in which Gadamer acknowledges the ubiquity of rhetoric and hermeneutics as components of linguisticity (Sprachlichkeit). Conceived in the context of non-methodical wisdom and phronesis, Gadamer's rehabilitated rhetoric is concerned with pragmatics and ethics. Rhetoric is no longer viewed as a technique of verbal manipulation and becomes relevant for dialogic communication. Gadamer thus joins the Habermasian criticism of formalized reason that is detached from values. Both of them reject instrumental reason, because it has colonized communicational reason. However, since Gadamer's view of rhetoric has also been criticized by Habermas and Ricoeur their objections cannot be overlooked in a discussion of his hermeneutics. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the implications of the debate on rhetoric, hermeneutics, and communication for the twenty-first century.     

Temporal nature and recycling of Upper Paleolithic artifacts: the burned tools from the Molí del Salt site (Vimbodí i Poblet,northeastern Spain)

Recent research in Paleolithic archeology has stressed the importance of temporal issues in assemblage interpretation. Archeological assemblages are temporal constructs, formed by the addition of an unknown number of depositional events. This temporal dimension is also evident at the artifactual level, since single artifacts may undergo different events of modification and/or uses over time. The recycling of previously discarded blanks for tool production is one of the best examples of the temporal nature of artifacts. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the importance of recycling in a Late Upper Paleolithic site, examining a type of artifact – burned tools – that has up to now been little used to approach this issue. Our results suggest that recycling was probably a significant component of Upper Paleolithic provisioning behavior, with important implications in site formation processes and the typological variability of assemblages. The expedient or curated character of recycling is also discussed.     

An Index of Social and Economic Development in the Community's Objective-1 Regions of Countries in Southern Europe

In this article we calculate an indicator of social and economic development using the DP₂ distance method to measure the disparities in Objective-1 regions of southern European countries for 2006. In addition to per capita income, socio-economic components such as health, education, employment, scientific and technological development and infrastructure provision have been incorporated into the index. We examine the issue of whether the Europe Union regions included in the Convergence Objective achieved a lower level of development than the regions no longer covered in this objective for the 2007–2013 programming period by establishing a territorial classification based on the value yielded by the variables of the DP₂. Our indicator constitutes a novel contribution insofar as it was constructed using a large number of variables. In essence, we show that not all the regions of the Convergence Objective presented a lower level of economic and social development than those that lost this consideration between 2007 and 2013 and the opposite.     

Famines past, famine's future

Famine, like poverty, has always been with us. No region and no century has been immune. Its scars — economic, psychological and political — can long outlast its immediate impact on mortality and health. Famines are a hallmark of economic backwardness, and were thus more likely to occur in the pre-industrialized past. Yet the twentieth century suffered some of the most devastating ever recorded. That century also saw shifts in both the causes and symptoms of famine. This new century's famines have been "small" by historical standards, and the threat of major ones seemingly confined to ever-smaller pockets of the globe. Are these shifts a sign of hope for the future?     

Schematic Rock Art,Rain-Making and Islam in the Ethio-Sudanese Borderlands

Two sites with schematic rock paintings in Western Ethiopia, where Islamic ceremonies connected with rain-making are performed and miraculous events are said to occur regularly, are interpreted in the light of such factors as the beliefs of local informants, the Islamic appropriation of prehistoric rituals in Northern Africa, the characteristics of similar sites linked to rain-making rituals throughout Eastern Africa and the apotropaic meaning of schematic marks in many traditional cultures. Probably painted by the ancestors of the current Koman language speakers during the Later Stone Age or shortly afterwards, the rock art contextual analysis reveals the complexity of interregional relationships and processes affecting the multi-ethnic frontier regions in pre-colonial times and shows how the local groups have recombined prehistoric and historic religions and ideologies into an original mix that bears witness to the region’s multifaceted history.