Implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems to Preserve Cultural Heritage — Pilot Motte Montferland

The shallow subsurface in historic cities often contains extensive archaeological remains, also known as cultural deposits. Preservation conditions for naturally degradable archaeological remains are strongly dependent on the presence or absence of groundwater. One of the main goals at such heritage sites is to establish a stable hydrological environment. Green infrastructural solutions such as Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) can support preservation of cultural deposits. Several cases show that implementation of SUDS can be cost effective at preservation of cultural deposits. These include Motte of Montferland, City mound of Vlaardingen, Weiwerd in Delfzijl, and the Leidse Rijn area. In all cases, the amount of underground infrastructure is minimised to prevent damaging cultural layers. SUDS have been implemented to preserve cultural heritage. The first monitoring results and evaluation of the processes give valuable lessons learned, transnational knowledge exchange is an important element to bring the experiences across boundaries.     

Heritage diplomacy

This paper explores the concept of heritage diplomacy. To date much of the analysis regarding the politics of heritage has focused on contestation, dissonance and conflict. Heritage diplomacy seeks to address this imbalance by critically examining themes such as cooperation, cultural aid and hard power, and the ascendency of intergovernmental and non-governmental actors as mediators of the dance between nationalism and internationalism. The paper situates heritage diplomacy within broader histories of international governance and diplomacy itself. These are offered to interpret the interplay between the shifting forces and structures, which, together, have shaped the production, governance and international mobilisation of heritage in the modern era. A distinction between heritage as diplomacy and in diplomacy is outlined in order to reframe some of the ways in which heritage has acted as a constituent of cultural nationalisms, international relations and globalisation. In mapping out directions for further enquiry, I argue the complexities of the international ordering of heritage governance have yet to be teased out. A framework of heritage diplomacy is thus offered in the hope that it can do some important analytical work in the field of critical heritage theory, opening up some important but under theorised aspects of heritage analysis.     

‘A common law of nations’: Giuseppe Mazzini's democratic nationality

The aim of this article is to analyse the theoretical origins and character of Giuseppe Mazzini's idea of the nation and the wider tensions within nationalist thinking. In particular I will ground Mazzini's idea of national self‐determination on his distinction between rights and duties and finally his republican (and in this sense political, not ethnic) view of the nation‐people. It will emerge that, even if Mazzini shared a voluntaristic idea of the nation, he none the less had a clear perception that the argument of popular consensus needed to be limited (and legitimated) by normative principles, which for him were true democratic principles. Mazzini's originality and modernity lay in his capacity to avoid being a universalist in the old cosmopolitan sense without becoming a relativist. He faced the tension between universality and national identity by making the former concrete and inclusive: universality meant humanity which revealed itself through and within each nation, and was synonymous with democracy. Democracy at home is the premise for democracy abroad: this is Mazzini's legacy.     

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.     

In the footsteps of George Orwell: Patrick McCarthy as Italian correspondent for Tribune, 1978–1980

Abstract

This paper examines Italy's contribution to the United Nations (UN) and how effective this has been in protecting Italian interests. The first part outlines the areas where Italy's input to the UN has been most relevant in terms of ideas, policies and participation, such as for example the campaign to ban the death penalty and its participation in collective security through participation in UN peacekeeping missions. This paper also highlights the critical role that Italy's long-standing positions on UN reform and the enlargement of the Security Council have played in defining Italy's status in the international community, and asks whether there have been significant changes in the traditional Italian position and its loyalty to the UN and, more generally, to the multilateral system. The second part analyzes the origin and rationale of Italy's policies toward the UN and their effectiveness in defining and defending the national interest. It explores the idea that these policies have been determined by the ‘institutional multilateralism’ of the Italian Constitution, the ‘genetic multilateralism’ of the Italian society and the ‘forced multilateralism’ of Italy as a middle-range power. Italy's positions on the UN and its reform are examined in the light of claims that Italy's foreign policy reflects its ‘complex of exclusion’ and presumed lack of influence in the ‘major stakes’ in world diplomacy.     

The exiles of the Risorgimento: Italian volunteers in the Portuguese Civil War (1832–34)

Abstract

Between 1832 and 1834 during the civil war against the partisans of absolutism in Portugal about a hundred Italians fought as volunteers in the Portuguese liberal army. These Italians were motivated to participate by a Romantic culture of war that was strongly rooted in the liberal nationalism of the Italian Risorgimento, but above all, the decision to fight as a volunteer abroad was the result of an international movement of political solidarity with Portuguese liberalism in the early 1830s with which the Italian liberals came into contact during their political exile in France and in Belgium. For the Italian, fighting as volunteers in Portugal proved to be a decisive political experience which deeply shaped their own political ideas of the nation that the volunteers would subsequently draw on in their different political and professional roles in Italy where they became ministers, diplomats and generals of the Kingdom of Italy.     

Fighting the Risorgimento: foreign volunteers in southern Italy (1860–63)

Abstract

Between 1860 and 1863 hundreds of men from all over Europe volunteered for service in the wars of southern ‘brigands’ on behalf of the exiled King Francis II of Naples. In an attempt to correct the often biased interpretation of this involvement (that was attributed simply to a thirst for adventure, romanticism or even psychological disorder) that coloured the accounts by Italian patriots, this essay suggests the need for fresh consideration. It develops three lines of inquiry that focus respectively on the strong impact of Italian Unification on conservative and Catholic opinion and the ways in which these sources portrayed the struggles of the southern insurgents, the clumsy efforts made by the Neapolitan government-in-exile to recruit volunteers and organize armed expeditions against the former kingdom, and the so-called ‘white international’ in which the warriors of the counter-revolution were depicted as combatants in conflicts that were both civil wars and at the same time episodes in a much longer international ideological struggle. In this context, the significance of foreign involvement in defence of the Neapolitan Bourbons takes on a significance that goes far beyond its poor military outcome.     

The foreign policy of First Republic Italy: new approaches

This introductory article deals with the most recent contributions by Italian historians on the Italian Republic's international role. It aims mainly to demonstrate that a new generation of younger Italian historians is successfully offering new views and interpretations on First Republic Italy's role in the international system, and is also focusing on aspects such as the culture of Italy's political parties, the economic dimension, the role of public opinion, and the influence of external actors on domestic Italian politics – in short, that there has been a turn away from traditional diplomatic history based upon the archives of the Foreign Ministry.     

SEISMIC BEHAVIOUR OF A R/C WALL: NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION

This paper describes the numerical simulation of the seismic behaviour of a mock-up of a six-floor building, constituted by two parallel R/C walls and experimentally tested on a shaking table. Within the scope of an international benchmark the mock-up was submitted to three earthquakes with intensities up to 0.71 g, which induced nonlinear behaviour in the concrete and reinforcement. For the numerical simulations concrete is discretised with 2D finite elements, and its behaviour reproduced via a constitutive model with two scalar damage variables. Steel rebars are discretised with 2-noded truss elements, and their constitutive behaviour under cyclic conditions reproduced by the Menegottb-Pinto model. Specific attention is devoted to Rayleigh damping, focusing on two different strategies: (i) disregarding the damping contribution, or (ii) adopting a damping matrix that takes into account the stiffness changes during the nonlinear analyses. Main results and strategies for simulating the benchmark axe presented, with emphasis on the comparison between the numerical and the experimental results, which show good agreement when the damping contribution is neglected.     

从国际法论中日钓鱼岛争端及其解决前景

章认为从国际法方面看钓鱼岛的主权属于中国,日本所主张的“无主地先占”原则根本不能成立。根据联合国新海洋法和国际司法判例,钓鱼岛不应享有大陆架和专属经济区,亦不具有划界效力。中日东海大陆架的划分应遵循公平和自然延伸的原则。在和平解决争端的前景下,钓鱼岛问题面临三种可能的选择。