From Berlin to Beijing

In late 1900, while foreign troops occupied Beijing in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, alarming news reached the German government from China: High-quality works of art were on sale in Beijing and would soon be displayed in museums in London and Paris without having a comparable display in Berlin. The Ethnological Museum in Berlin immediately sent the Orientalist Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Müller (1863–1930) as an envoy to Beijing to buy works of art. Müller was in Beijing between 6 April and 13 September 1901. This article contains a partially annotated translation of Müller’s report, including his packing lists of 117 crates he sent to Berlin in 1901. The original German text is included as an addendum.     

The Lion Wreck: a survey of a 17th‐century Dutch merchant ship—an interim report

In 2009 the well‐preserved wreck of a 17th‐century merchant ship was found at a depth of 50 m in the Stockholm Archipelago. On the top of the ship's rudder is a carved lion, inspiring the working name ‘Lion Wreck’. The state of preservation provides a rare opportunity to study the conditions on board a typical 17th‐century Dutch merchant ship trading in the Baltic. The aim of this text is to describe and summarize the first thorough survey of the site, carried out in spring 2010. © 2011 The Author     

‘The Ghost Ship’. An Intact Fluyt from c.1650 in the Middle of the Baltic Sea

We report an exceptionally well preserved 17th‐century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. The investigation of the intact 3‐dimensional hull at 130 m depth in the cold dark water has demanded new methods of documentation. Field investigation of ‘The Ghost Ship’ has been done in co‐operation with a nautical survey company, combining archaeological skills with advanced technology and filming for a television documentary. The discovery offers detailed knowledge about Dutch shipbuilding and the construction of fluyts. We also believe that study of the social organisation aboard this small trading ship can give insights into the mentality and ideology of the period. © 2012 The Authors     

Lost at Sea: Finnish government,shipping companies and the United Nations embargo against China during the 1950s

Finnish Cold War foreign policy was based on the desire to stay out of all international disputes. Yet, during the 1950s, two Finnish tankers, Wiima and Aruba, received an enormous amount of foreign attention when they tried to sail to Communist China. The United Nations had urged all countries, including non-members such as Finland, to stop selling strategic goods to China, which had intervened in the Korean War. The embargo created a highly profitable opening in the shipping market for anyone willing to transport such goods, and Finnish companies tried to fill it. This article suggests that they were in fact undermining the embargo more extensively than has been generally known. When the Finns were criticized for their actions, they interpreted this as a sign of the ruthlessness of great powers. At first, the Finnish government failed to recognize that these companies drove the country into the middle of international conflict and then took little decisive action to steer the country out of it. The allegedly pragmatic Finnish foreign policy was in this case actually based on unreliable information and incorrect assumptions.     

Values in a vacuum? Towards an integrated multi‐level analysis of the governance of European space

This article calls for a new analytical approach to address how the emergence of a new European spatial policy field conditions policy‐making and implementation across Europe. This is now urgent because as the new policy field takes shape, its core ideas and values are being contested across different scales, sectors and territories of governance, creating new debates and arenas where understandings of space, place and connectivity, and relations between environment, society and economy, are being recast in a European light. In the full flow of generating a new policy field, we still seem to know little about what is being put at stake, or specifically how this is occurring. A value‐driven critical response from the research community is therefore needed, informed by research activity reaching across many dimensions of governance and policy‐making. The point of developing such an approach is not to discount previous research, but to explore how to generate synthetic and critical insights from different disciplinary and conceptual approaches within an integrated analytical framework. After this discussion, we conclude by proposing that IMAGES (Integrated Multi‐level Analysis of the Governance of European Space) can provide such a framework for analysing the emerging policy field of European spatial polices by constructing narratives of how spatial policy ideas and concepts turn into programming space, and how different territories interrelate with these policy concepts, and at the same time contribute to shaping them. This viewpoint and framework are predicated on the authors' belief that values behind the concepts remain hidden at present, both in policy processes and related research. Spatial policies seem to happen in a vacuum of values. By putting spatial justice as a value into this vacuum and by exploring the multi‐level governance of European space within an integrative analytical framework, the further development and application of the IMAGES framework can fulfil the need to contest the idea of objective policy‐making and analysis in European spatial policy.     

Policy attributes shape climate policy support

Understanding how preferences for public policy instruments shape policy support helps policymakers to design policies that begin to tackle large-scale and complex problems, such as climate change. Climate change policies generate both local and global costs and benefits, which affect the public's policy preferences. In this article we investigate the role of perceived conditional cooperation and distributive concerns on climate policy attitude formation. We identify a range of climate policies and test public opinion for adoption of these policies at different scales of government. The important theoretical distinction is the scale-driven distributional nature of policy costs and benefits as well as concerns regarding the cooperation of other actors. We use data from Sweden and a conjoint experimental design where we vary level of government, type of policy, and the targeted group. We find evidence that people support policies when costs are shared broadly. We also find that support for climate policy is conditional on expected policy adoption by other units of government at various scales. This implies that unpopular climate policies might be more popular if the funding structure of the policy allows for binding policy and that the cost-sharing is taking place at higher levels of government.