European Policy and the Regions: A Review and Analysis of Tensions

This article explores a series of tensions inherent in the series of European policies that are designed to improve the competitiveness of regions in the face of globalization. Its focus is the co-existence of interventionist policies intended to overcome problems of lagging regions such as cohesion policies and those, for example competition policy which are designed to remove barriers to market integration and that are anti-interventionist. Moreover, the changing relationship between the European Union (EU), member states and the regions and problems of how regions are defined complicate policy implementation. To review these issues, the article adopts an agent-centred approach to understanding economic behaviour in the face of globalization in particular geographical and sectoral contexts. This methodology is used to highlight five sources of tension relating to the reality of the experience of globalization. These are illustrated by evidence from a recently completed EU Fifth Framework Programme study of regional adjustment strategies and technological change in five European countries.     

The second generation of human security: lessons from the UN and EU experience

The concept of human security, while much contested in both academic and policy debates, and highly fragmented across different meanings and forms of implementation, offers a potential locus around which global security discourse might converge, particularly in light of current shifts in US security thinking. However, key pioneers of human security, such as the United Nations and Canada, appear to be losing their enthusiasm for the concept, just at the moment when others such as the European Union, are advancing a human security agenda. This article examines the divergence of human security narratives between the UN and the EU. It argues that the UN's use of the concept ran aground owing to a triple problematic of lack of clarity, confusion between previously distinct policy streams on human rights and human development and conceptual overstretch. After assessing the EU experience with the concept to date, the article argues that future use of human security will require greater focus on how it deepens ideas of individual security, rather than treating it as an agenda for broadening security. As well as a need to project clarity on the conceptual definition of human security, there is also a need to associate human security with greater clarity of intent. If successful, this would contribute to establishing second generation human security as a new policy paradigm.     

WHO SUFFERED FROM THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM? A DUTCH EXAMPLE

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working‐class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo‐Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms.     

Lincoln and Emancipation: Constitutional Theory,Practical Politics,and the Basic Practice of Law

Abraham Lincoln is, by any measure, our greatest President. Whenever we are asked to rank our Presidents, Lincoln comes out on top. This makes sense. His job, leading the nation through four years of Civil War, was the hardest of any President and he accomplished it so stunningly well: winning the War, preserving the Union, and ending slavery.     

Moyes,Menzies, and the Vietnam War: New Insights Into the Public Correspondence Between the Prime Minister and the Bishops

In March 1965 a group of Anglican bishops signed an open letter to the prime minister of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies, expressing its concerns about the rapid deterioration of the situation in Vietnam. The letter had been composed by the retired Bishop of Armidale, John Stoward Moyes. The bishops urged Menzies to use his influence with the United States Government to ensure that the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the conflict could be explored to the full. The letter, and the prime minister's public response, thrust John Moyes and his episcopal co‐signatories into the centre of a national debate on Vietnam. Following Menzies's brusque reply, Moyes composed a second and more critical open letter. The prime minister then issued a more detailed response one week before he committed Australian combat troops to the Vietnam War. The initiative taken by Bishop Moyes constituted the first major instance of public debate in Australia concerning the wisdom and morality of the government's policy on Vietnam.     

Evolutionary Perspectives on Rural Australia

An enduring concern within Australian rural geography has been to understand the nature and implications of change. Much of the intellectual effort has been focused on interpreting how rural economies, populations, social institutions, cultures, and land uses have been transformed through processes operating across a range of spatial and temporal scales. This paper offers a critical appraisal of recent rural research in Australia and how this body of work has attempted to make sense of change. It argues that despite an ongoing focus on the nature of change, it is often reduced to a relatively simple historical narrative. We suggest that some of the emerging ideas in ‘evolutionary economic geography’ might offer an alternative means of conceptualising the trajectories of rural economies, institutions, and communities. The paper outlines the contours of evolutionary economic geography and the ways in which some of its key conceptual foundations might offer a means of understanding not only rural change, but also continuity.     

ARAMAIC BASALT STATUES FROM TELL HALAF,SYRIA: LOCATING THE ANCIENT QUARRIES

Tell Halaf is the locality of the ancient Aramaic city of Guzāna (c. 1000–800 bc ) in Syria. The statues of Tell Halaf were made from monolithic basalt blocks, comprising massive as well as amygdaloidal types. However, the exact location of the original quarries was as yet unknown. Reconnaissance mapping and sampling concentrated on the four basaltic centres in the vicinity of Tell Halaf, covering both south‐eastern Turkey and north‐eastern Syria. In addition, basaltic artefacts from the two archaeological sites of Tell Beydar (c. 2700–2300 bc ) and Djebelet el Beda (c. 2600–2350 bc ) were investigated. All basalt samples were analysed for their bulk rock major and trace element compositions by X‐ray fluorescence, ICP–MS analysis and the mineral chemistry of individual minerals by combined electron microprobe analysis and laser‐ablation ICP–MS. The data show that basalt works of art from all three archaeological sites were derived from the Syrian basalt plateau of Ard esh‐Sheikh, approximately 57 km south of Tell Halaf. Accordingly, this basalt quarry was actively exploited over a considerable time span of c. 1900 years. This study demonstrates that petrographic and geochemical investigations of basalt, combined with electron microprobe and laser‐ablation ICP–MS analysis of minerals, are powerful tools to discriminate between possible sources of raw materials, especially if isotopic data yield unsatisfying results.     

Gambling,Resource Distribution,and Racial Economy: An Examination of Poker Machine Expenditure in Three Remote Australian Towns

Our aim in this paper is to examine the ways in which electronic gaming machines (EGMs) redistribute resources to and from three remote towns in the Northern Territory (NT), namely Katherine, Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy. We describe EGM expenditure levels in each town at the level of the individual venue, examine patterns of socioeconomic status within each town, explore the ways in which EGM markets are racialised through venue gate‐keeping practices and spatially‐based alcohol regulations, and examine the effects of resource redistribution mechanisms designed to return a proportion of EGM profits to host communities. The ability of venues to draw resources from extremely disadvantaged groups from the remote periphery is of central concern when attempting to assess the societal consequences of gambling in remote towns, both in terms of individual harm and the adequacy of resource redistribution. Existing mechanisms for resource redistribution are both selective and relatively meagre, pointing to a political and racial economy of EGM gambling that transfers resources from remote towns to sites of centralised ‘white’ power. We conclude that political economy in the context of remote NT towns may not be understood outside a consideration of racial economy and the way that constructed notions of race operate to legitimate existing processes of economic exploitation and resource redistribution.     

Fifty shades of purple? A risk‐sharing approach to the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review

The next Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) will be held in 2015. With unfinished business from its 2010 predecessor, and with no sign that UK national strategy is about to escape the grip of austerity, the 2015 SDSR is set to be more complex and contentious than the government might have hoped. There is a possibility that the review will, yet again, see the three armed services struggle against each other to secure the largest slice of a diminishing cake. The review might also be captured by a fruitless discussion of ‘grand strategy’. SDSR 2015 must avoid both of these distractions. There are four principal concerns arising from SDSR 2010: the feasibility of the Future Force 2020 plan; various capability gaps that must be managed; inconsistencies in the national strategic planning framework; and unresolved concerns about the relationship between society, armed forces and government in the UK. In response to these concerns, the authors argue for a risk‐sharing approach to the SDSR, embracing the widest conceivable range of stakeholders in national strategy: the armed services; government departments and agencies; industry; civil society; and allies and partners. In UK military circles, inter‐service cooperation is known as ‘jointery’ and is denoted by a certain shade of purple. The effect of austerity is to constrain national strategy, just as the international security environment makes ever more demands upon it. In these circumstances, strategic options must be generated by joint collaboration, denoted by as many shades of purple as appropriate.