The decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy

One of the classical questions in the study of nationalism concerns the end of empires. Is nationalism, to use the phrase of Hiers and Wimmer, the cause or consequence of the end of empire? This paper considers a neglected case, that of the decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy in the years between 1848 and 1864. We find that nationalist conflicts indisputably caused the end of this political entity. Crucially, Danish nationalists in the imperial core preferred to downsize the territories controlled by the Oldenburgs rather than to share power with German speakers in the periphery. Decomposition was not, however, inevitable: an early introduction of power‐sharing schemes might have saved the imperial monarchy.     

What can and cannot be willed: how politicians talk about national identity and immigrants

The ethnic‐civic framework remains widely used in nationalism research. However, in the context of European immigrant integration politics, where almost all ‘nation talk’ is occurring in civic and liberal registers, the framework has a hard time identifying how conceptions of national identity brought forth in political debate differ in their exclusionary potential. This leads some to the conclusion that national identity is losing explanatory power. Building on the insights of Oliver Zimmer, I argue that we may find a different picture if we treat cultural content and logic of boundary construction – two parameters conflated in the ethnic‐civic framework – as two distinct analytical levels. The framework I propose focuses on an individual and collective dimension of logic of boundary construction that together constitute the inclusionary/exclusionary core of national identity. The framework is tested on the political debate on immigrant integration in Denmark and Norway in selected years. Indeed, the framework enables us to move beyond the widespread idea that Danish politicians subscribe to an ethnic conception of the nation, while Norwegian political thought is somewhere in between an ethnic and civic conception. The true difference is that Danish politicians, unlike their Norwegian counterparts, do not acknowledge the collective self‐understanding as an object of political action.     

Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and the foundations of history and politics

This article explores the intellectual relations between Carl Schmitt and the German historian Reinhart Koselleck with a focus on the inspiration that Koselleck found in Schmitt's work in the early 1950s. The article goes beyond earlier contributions in the field by illuminating how the most important discursive features that Koselleck drew from Schmitt were utilized toward a very independent intellectual project. This project concerned an attempt to revise modern political thought by means of outlining a new concept of history. Koselleck's concept of history was to depart from all utopian notions of history as a singular, unified and goal-directed process. Instead, it aimed to outline certain fundamental existential structures of the human condition and to take account of the social relations existing among human beings in order to understand (historically) and contain (politically) the potential conflict in human societies. Hence Koselleck believed that his new concept of history would lead to a more responsible foundation of political order and decision making. Following an analysis of how Koselleck developed his project in a dialogue with the work of Schmitt and a number of other scholars, first of all Friedrich Meinecke and Martin Heidegger, the article presents a brief perspective on how his new concept of history was received in the 1950s and on how it came to provide his work with a certain analytical, thematic and argumentative unity.     

Selected physical parameters to characterize the state of preservation of waterlogged archaeological wood: a practical guide for their determination

Non-destructive and destructive methods for determining the physical parameters of waterlogged wood such as the porosity, the water content, the wet and dry bulk densities plus the density of the cell wall material are presented. Considerations in respect to determination of masses, volumes and sampling size are discussed.     

The South African Transition: From Development to Security?

This article questions some recent analyses which claim that global neo‐liberal discourses are disseminated to shift the focus away from development towards a greater emphasis on security issues. Taking as its point of departure the analysis of empirical material from Cape Town, the article shows that security and development in South Africa were never separate concerns. After the ANC came to power in 1994 there was an effort to boost development efforts rather than security. However, these efforts were soon dwarfed by local circumstances, notably the pressure from local state employees who felt their jobs and lives to be under threat from the townships, and the changing nature of violence in the city. The first part of the article details the practices and discourses of state agencies; the second section analyses the consequences of reconfigured security and development concerns for the production of political subjectivity in South Africa's townships.