Changes and turning points in welfare history. A case study: a comparison of France and Italy in the 1940s

An interesting case study in the history of welfare systems is the comparison between France and Italy. In fact, in the 1940s both countries had to tackle a very similar dilemma: the corrective reform of their existing welfare or the institution of reforms in line with the ‘universal’ model. This was a crucial turning point. Understanding these dynamics means grasping the significance of one of the most important moments in the history of the welfare state. The proposed reforms were ultimately rejected. Why? The aim of this article is to try to provide an answer to this question, examining the issue at various levels. It highlights the interactions between the top-down choices (the theoretical reflections and the political decisions) and grassroots dynamics (of social groups), and illustrates the decision-making process that led to the final outcome. The article is based largely on documents, often unpublished, from both French and Italian archives.     

‘Mother's Blood,Father's Land’: Native Title and Comparative Land Tenure Modelling for Claims in ‘Settled’ Australia

Anthropologists working in the field of Australian native title are required to piece together the early laws and customs of claimant groups and assess the degree to which these have continued since the assumption of British sovereignty. The former task is often difficult in south‐eastern Australia because of a lack of good quality early records. I suggest here that there are general principles of Aboriginal land tenure that can be recovered from elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, where the ethnography is of a better standard, and these can be used as a guide for working with the patchier materials characteristic of the south‐east. The principles mainly cohere around the organic relationship between patrilineal descent and complementary filiation, and are shown to be relevant to the modelling of contemporary south‐eastern tenure, where people speak of ‘bloodlines’ identified with ancestral lands.     

The State and Financialization of Public Land in the United Kingdom

There exists an influential and growing political‐economic literature on the treatment of land—urban and rural—as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.     

Prefiguring the State

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished‐for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.     

Europe's confused transmutation: the realignment of moral cartography in Juan de la Cosa's Mappa Mundi (1500)

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a transitional blend of the medieval and the modern at the crossroads between two mappings of Europe. This paper argues that the Juan De la Cosa map represents a blurred transition between map-making traditions and a mixed moral rhetoric of European identity. The De la Cosa map operates across two sets of imagined axes: held horizontally, the map is set to a Ptolemaic grid with Europe straddling the Prime Meridian, and yet when held vertically it presents a medieval moral continuum in which the Americas occupy an ascendant position, a verdant new Jerusalem in contrast to the Babylon of the Old World. Europe is both drawn to the centre of a new world order, and also pushed to the moral margins in an echo of the medieval mappa mundi still imperfectly resolved.     

IS COMPARATIVE HISTORY POSSIBLE?

In recent years the trend toward comparative histories, frequently read in terms of transnational studies, has produced some remarkably exciting work. The prospect of the comparative is gaining broader appeal, a development we should applaud but at the same time begin to examine in a critical fashion. This essay lays out some of the problems involved in comparative work and suggests ways in which we might profitably utilize these potential snares in productive ways. Comparative history has the potential to operate as a “bridge‐builder,” encouraging inventive thinking that moves scholars beyond the familiar terrain of their training. In this respect, it encourages original and innovative ways of approaching historical work. But there are lessons to be learned and problems to be faced in managing a complex scholarly enterprise of this kind. Comparative work runs the risk of reproducing and consolidating older models of universalist history that assume universal standards. It further runs the risk of assuming rather than historicizing the idea of the nation as a fixed point of historical reference rather than seeing the nation itself as a site for historical scrutiny. In this paper, my goal is to lay out these problems alongside the palpable rewards of comparative work, and then to suggest how we might turn such problems to our advantage.     

Agamben,Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.     

Policy Innovativeness and Interstate Compacts

Are some American states inherently more innovative than others? This question has confounded researchers for more than four decades. In this study we develop a measure of collective policy innovation that measures formal cooperative policy arrangements among the states, compare the measure to existing measures of internal state policy innovation, and assess whether existing innovativeness measures explain policy cooperation among the states. This test of the innovativeness concept addresses internal and external validity concerns that have long plagued this research tradition. Our multivariate analyses indicate that policy innovativeness is often a statistically and substantively important determinant of compact participation. These results suggest that (i) innovativeness is a meaningful and durable state attribute, (ii) several existing indices successfully capture the underlying latent concept, and (iii) innovativeness provides analytic utility in multiple empirical contexts.