Constitutionalism,the Public Philosophy,and Political Science

Examining Willa Cather's corpus of literary works reveals several phases of her illustrious career. After defending commercial culture in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, her later novels, especially her One of Ours, diagnose an unmediated split in the Western world illustrated by the experience of the Great War: the bourgeois commercial culture undermines aspirations for human greatness. Her later novels deepen this diagnosis and offer a way out in a return to a rooted community of believers living in the shadows of the Church.     

Setting Moon and Rising Nationalism: Lugou Bridge as Monument and Memory

This paper examines Beijing’s Lugou Bridge (Marco Polo Bridge) in terms of monument and memory. With 800 years of history to its credit, this structure carries with it a select set of textual memories passed down from one dynasty to the next, and finally into the 20th century when its traditional associations of architectural and natural beauty were supplemented by its modern association with the beginning of the Anti‐Japanese War of Resistance (Second World War in China). With the opening of Sino‐Japanese diplomacy in the 1970s, the Chinese authorities began to accredit further significance to the bridge as a site of Chinese indignation over Japan’s perceived refusal to take responsibility for its wartime aggression. This point was driven home most forcefully through the construction of the Anti‐Japanese War Memorial Hall in 1985, and the continuing use of the site as a tool of diplomacy. Lugou Bridge, therefore, serves to demonstrate how political authority and cultural nationalism are constructed through the continuing appropriation of monumental artefacts and traditions.     

Pacifying War Heritage: Patterns of Cosmopolitan Nationalism at a Danish Battlefield Site

Former battlefields are often held to be important nodes in national iconographies. This article offers an analysis of a Danish battlefield site which has historically been taken to epitomise fervently ethnic national qualities. The article traces significant shifts in the ways its relevance has been and currently is being imagined and expressed. The heritage and commemorative practices conducted here are analysed as an ongoing symbolic struggle between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ conceptions of nation. It is argued that a third mode of identification, termed ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, seems to be on the rise here. In such an understanding, the war site becomes ‘pacified’, i.e. symbolically associated with qualities of peace‐keeping and humanitarianism. Importantly, however, such agendas do not simply erase the site’s national significance but are analysed, rather, as re‐imbuing the site with a new strand of Danishness—now taken to entail cosmopolitan and reconciliatory values.     

War museums as agonistic spaces: possibilities,opportunities and constraints

ABSTRACT

Following the theorisation of museums as agonistic spaces and drawing on a comparative analysis of war museums located in various European countries, this paper argues that these institutions play complex and multi-layered roles beyond their obvious educational function. These not easily reconcilable roles act as major constraints upon the form and content of exhibitions and work against the adoption of an agonistic approach. However, the paper also argues that war museums are especially apt to become sites of political contestation able to engage with agonistic memory and unsettling counter-narratives. This is due in large part to the nature of the subject matter they deal with, as war and conflict lend themselves to being represented in ways that emphasise patriotic consensus but can also highlight dissent, contestation, multiple perspectives and alternative visions of society. Agonistic practices emerge when windows of opportunity open through a combination of top-down and bottom-up agency able to take advantage of particular socio-political circumstances or cultural developments. The paper also discusses a new exhibition on war memory planned for late 2018 in Essen, Germany and conceived as a strategic political intervention, which aims to communicate in an agonistic fashion with its audiences.     

Muted violence: Italian war crimes in occupied Greece

This article considers the myth of Italians as ‘good people’ that has dominated post-war historiography as well as the public and institutional discourse, and analyses the connection between the judiciary paradigm and the historical narrative of the Second World War. It presents an account of Italian war crimes in occupied Greece and suggests a possible interpretation regarding the military violence towards the civilian population. War crimes are considered within the context of the general orientation of the fascist policy of occupation and the structures of conflict that emerged in the occupied territories. In particular, it discusses the turning point in Italian repressive action, from the logic of reprisal to a policy of massacre.     

The Italian political system and détente (1963 - 1981)

This article examines the impact of détente on the Italian political system, linking together internal and international dynamics in both the political and the economic spheres. Relying on various new archival sources, it analyzes the conflicting effects on Italy of both the relaxing of Cold War tension and bipolarism, and the 'bipolar' strategy to reassert US hegemony: the failure of the reformist design of the center?-?left of the 1960s; the 'strategy of attention' in 1969?-?71 and its sudden halt; the building of a 'devaluation model' after the end of Bretton Woods, and the consequent shift from Kissinger's neo-centrism to 'national solidarity'. Détente favoured a crisis of the centrist pattern of Italian politics but at the same time the 'bipolar' features of both the US and the Soviet 'strategies of détente' led to a decline in US hegemony, relaunching the DC's centrality and its ability to manage external constraints. Reaganism was to recast US hegemony on a new basis.     

Armed and unarmed: struggles without weapons in Europe and in Italy

Abstract

The starting point for this article is the concept of civil resistance formulated by the French historian Jacques Semelin to describe the forms of unarmed and often non-violent resistance adopted during the Nazi occupations. These included strikes, protests against high food prices, refusal to join Nazi professional associations, the moral isolation of the enemy, actions to rescue Jews, the organisation of clandestine schools (in Poland) as well as support for armed struggle. While historians have looked on these struggles merely as secondary to or supportive of armed restsitance, the concept of civil resistance shows instead how they were autonomous social responses to Nazi dominion. After showing how since the 1990s there has been much closer dialogue between these two apparoaches, the article examines the ways in which the forms of civil resistance in Italy differed from countries such as Denmark, with greater emphasis on private actions and indivdual intiatives and informal networks in which women were always especiallly active and influential. In Italy, civil resistance seems to have been less ‘political’ and more ‘female’ than in northern Europe. The article concludes by examining the realtionship between the struggles in which women were involved and the concept of civil resistance, which although extremely important is only one step towards a fuller evaluation of the role of women in civil resistance.     

The Italian resistance between history and memory

Abstract

Since the 1960s the Resistance has held pride of place in public ceremonial, political debate and to a point also in historcial writing in Italy. The emphasis on its popular and national character transformed the Resistance into the struggle of the whole country to rid Italy of the German invaders and the small number of Italian fascists who remained their allies, but in ways that took no account of the complexity of people's reactions and the different ways in which Italians experienced the years immediately after the fall of fascism. In the last decade, however, numerous accounts have been published that contradict the images of the Resistance that for 30 years have constituted the ‘official’ memory of the Italian Republic. As a result, the Resistance offers a classic example of the ‘public use of history’, in which historical interpretation has served primarily to justify party political, instutitional and idelogical ends. It is now clear, however, that the supposed unity against fascism was more the result of agreement that there were limits beyond which political differences could not be pressed rather than of a deeper political unity that might have provided the basis for the political and institutional reform of the Italian Republic. The contrasting memories and interpretations of that period that have recently re-emerged for the same reason make it more difficult to project a new Italian democracy for the future.     

Defending ‘the Principle of Representation’: Andrew Bisset,The English Civil War,and The History of the Struggle for Parliamentary Government in England

Abstract

Victorian attitudes to the past were varied and in some cases irreconcilable. Newer standards of expertise and objectivity coexisted with older approaches, and the idea that history should be used for present purposes remained intact. Throughout the Victorian age there were circumstances in which history was a polemical tool, designed to give one set of interpretations or values or policies an advantage over its rivals. This article explores the work of a relatively neglected figure in Victorian historiography – the reform-minded historian and lawyer Andrew Bisset (1803–1891) – whose primary goal was to illustrate and advance what he called ‘the principle of representation’. He discussed people and events of the past to this end, offending reviewers along the way because of his obvious political agenda, but also developing a rigorous source-based style, usefully evaluating for his readers the work of Macaulay, Carlyle, and others, and helping to shape Victorian opinion about, in particular, the political and religious crises of seventeenth-century Britain. Like others, Bisset believed that the disputes of that period had relevance to the public controversies of his own day. This article is designed to contribute to ongoing debates about the Victorians’ relationship with the past.     

Modern witnesses: foreign correspondents, geopolitical vision, and the First World War

The First World War was the first modern, mediated conflict. In this paper I argue that British correspondents on the Western front attempting to accurately witness the war encountered a crisis of representation and visuality. They occupied a particularly unstable position between the many sites and points of view within a cubist landscape of shattered geographies and unstable boundaries. Their writings, though rich in masculinist and nationalistic accounts of heroism, also contain a newer perspective characterized by the failure to fit these older narratives into the inhuman, incomprehensible spaces of modern war.