Leaving the War Popular Violence and Judicial Repression of ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour in Belgium (1918–1921)

After four years of occupation, Belgium emerged ruined at the end of the Great War. The King returned from Yser, leading the army and acclaimed by the population. In contrast, the government and the exiles came back discreetly and the absence of the dead was felt strongly. Part of the population felt itself to be the victim of the occupation and sought revenge: shop windows were broken and houses sacked, men were molested and women's heads shaven. Manufacturers who had closed their businesses sought the severe repression of those who had pursued their activities. Journalists who had stopped writing called for harsh treatment of the newspapers that submitted to German censorship. A fraction of the population stigmatised those who profited from the occupation and demanded justice. In 1918, Belgium was already confronted with problems that most European countries only discovered at the end of the Second World War. How does one move on from a war of occupation? How does one reconstruct a state weakened by occupation? How does one handle collective vengeance and respond to calls for justice? This article will study successively the wave of ‘popular’ violence accompanying the country's liberation in November and December 1918 and the state's answer through the judiciary repression of collaboration with the enemy conducted between 1919 and 1921, mainly by military and civil tribunals.     

Bound by blood: the ethnic and civic nature of collective identities in the Basque Country,Catalonia and Valencia

This paper explores the factors determining collective identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, paying special attention to language and birth as key domains of ethnolinguistic divide. We will also make a comparison to the case of Valencia, a region with a native language that nevertheless has not developed a nationalist movement. We have performed a cluster analysis to compare the differences between collective identities in these regions using data from the survey on National Identity in Spain, and discriminant analysis is used to test the validity of our model. Results show that an ethnolinguistic division, based on parental origin and linguistic skills, defines peripheral identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, but this singularity cannot be found for Valencia. Finally, our model corroborates the relevance of ethnolinguistic factors in defining collective identities in the Basque and Catalan regions, while the civic factor may be more relevant in Valencia.     

Ecological Inference and Spatial Variation of Individual Behavior: National Divide and Elections in Catalonia

When in geography one reconstructs individual behavior starting from aggregated data through ecological inference, a crucial aspect is the spatial variation of individual behavior. Basic ecological inference methods treat areas as if they were all exchangeable, which in geographical applications is questionable due to the existence of contextual effects that relate to area location and induce spatial dependence. Here that assumption is avoided by basing ecological inference on a model that simultaneously does a cluster analysis, grouping together areas with similar individual behavior, and an ecological inference analysis in each cluster, estimating the individual behavior in the areas of each group. That allows one to capture most of the spatial dependence and summarize the individual behavior at a local level through the behavior estimated for each cluster. This approach is used to investigate vote switching in Catalonia, where voters split across a national allegiance divide on top of the ideological divide. That leads to Catalans having a lot of options to choose from, and to them voting differently depending on whether the election is for the Catalan parliament or for the Spanish parliament. To investigate that, the results in the two most recent pairs of such elections are analyzed by simultaneously clustering areas based on the similarity of their vote and vote switch patterns, and estimating one vote switch pattern for each cluster. As a result, Catalonia is partitioned into four clusters that have a strong spatial structure, with all the areas in the same cluster having similar demographic composition. The estimated vote switch patterns are quite different across clusters but very similar across pairs of elections, and they help assess how the differential voter turnout and the strategic dual vote effects vary in space.     

Intended Ties with Local Institutions as Factors in Innovation: An Application to Spanish Manufacturing Firms

In this paper we seek to check for a number of interactions between firms and the external environment. We aim to contribute to the discussion on the role of the regional environment in a firm's innovation performance. We test the statistical significance of a number of particular interactions between institutions and firm innovation. In particular, we have hypothesized the association between trade and professional institutions, technological centres, and cooperation arrangements and innovation. In contrast with existing studies, we have provided empirical evidence of the impact of external factors on individual firms.     

Trampling experiments at Cova Gran de Santa Linya,Pre-Pyrenees,Spain: their relevance for archaeological fabrics of the Upper–Middle Paleolithic assemblages

The study of fabrics, that is, the analysis of the orientation and slope of archaeological and sedimentary materials associated with the Middle Palaeolithic/Upper Palaeolithic (MP/UP) transition at Cova Gran shows substantial differences. Archaeological assemblages are characterised by greater isotropy in the fabrics than the sedimentary levels within which they are located, indicating that these differences may be generated by anthropic processes. One of the anthropogenic processes associated with horizontal and vertical displacement of archaeological artefacts is trampling and circulation caused by later occupations. In order to evaluate the effect of movement on materials, we undertook experiments simulating geological and archaeological conditions at Cova Gran. The results show that human trampling does not cause major isotropy in fabrics, but arranges archaeological assemblages towards planar or linear materials according to surface geometry. We were not able to replicate the fabric pattern of materials from the archaeological levels of Cova Gran, suggesting that they must be associated with the activities of human occupation at each level.