LOCAL POLITICAL PRACTICE IN RESPONSE TO A MANUFACTURING PLANT CLOSURE: HOW GEOGRAPHY COMPLICATES CLASS ANALYSIS

This paper analyzes the responses to two separate closures of a large glass manufacturing plant in Clarksburg, West Virginia, to examine how geography has been integral to the conduct of local political practice in this community. When the plant, by far the local area's largest manufacturing employer, first closed in 1979 the state and local government put together a considerable package of incentives to attract a purchaser for the facility. However, although glass production continued, the plant was again closed in 1987 after a corporate takeover. In response to this second closure the characteristically pro-business Governor of West Virginia initiated an almost $650 million lawsuit against the plant's new owners. The plant's union leaders on the other hand collaborated with city government officials and local business interests to constrain community opposition to the closure. The paper argues that this paradoxical situation, of actors taking up positions contrary to those which an ageographical class analysis would have predicted, was the result precisely of their locality dependence in the face of mobile capital.     

Homemaking and Mature Age Gay Men ‘Down-Under’: Paradox,intimacy, subjectivities,spatialities, and scale

The article investigates homemaking processes of mature age gay men living in a provincial Australian town. All too often the experience of older gay men living in non-metropolitan centres has slipped the attention of scholars. The article draws on interview data collected in Townsville (Queensland, Australia) from ten men over 40 years of age who self-identified as gay. These men were asked to explain why they live in Townsville, their understanding of home, and if they understand Townsville as home. We investigate the spatialised understandings of home articulated by these gay men, focusing on two mutually constituted geographical scales: Townsville-as-home and house-as-home, including the material objects within domestic space. For older gay men to call a provincial town home is an ongoing, complex process of reconciling multiple and contradictory subjectivities across different geographical scales. How older gay men constitute Townsville-as-home provides important insights about both non-heterosexual life in provincial centres and how to conceptualise home—as a paradoxical space, contested site, and as multiscalar.     

Why a British referendum on EU membership will not solve the Europe question

This article scrutinizes the merits of holding a referendum over UK membership of the EU. It queries the assumption that direct democracy can somehow resolve the longstanding Europe question in British politics. To do this, the analysis traces the existence of an exceptionalist approach to the EU within Britain, now associated with re‐negotiating UK membership in the shadow of a referendum. The article argues that the prospects for a radical reconfiguration of the UK's treaty obligations are slim, thereby increasing the risk of a vote to withdraw. Yet withdrawal would be the opposite of a simple solution to the Europe question. Political and economic interests dictate lengthy politicking over a highly complex post‐Brexit settlement revisiting free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Such negotiations undermine any mooted cathartic benefits of a popular vote, while Eurosceptics will remain dissatisfied in the event of a yes, a result likely to further destabilize the Conservative Party. Consequently, the simplicity and decisiveness that a referendum—particularly one that spurns the EU—promises is merely a mirage as relations with the EU necessarily form part of an enduring British political conversation.     

Hegemony,liberalism and global order: what space for would‐be great powers?

This article, and the four that follow, consider some of the ways in which China, Russia, India and Brazil have responded both to US hegemony and to the changing character of international society. This article sets out some of the major analytical questions that emerge when thinking about the foreign policy options of these countries and some of the principal conceptual and theoretical categories within which those questions may be usefully framed. The first section examines the reasons for taking these countries as a group. The second section provides a brief overview of two of the most common theoretical perspectives from which the systemic pressures on these countries have been understood. The third considers their actual and potential strategies and options under five headings: their status as regional powers; their behaviour within and towards international institutions; their relations with the United States; collaboration among them and evidence for the possible emergence of balancing behaviour; and the links between economic development and foreign policy.     

Allocating blame: dissecting the Coalition's failures in Iraq

A number of books by former Coalition officials are now emerging that provide detailed insights into aspects of US and UK policy-making before and during the occupation of Iraq. Two of these books lay the blame for the failure to stabilize rapidly the country and to ensure a peaceful process of political transition squarely on the shoulders of the Bush administration, the Department of Defense and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Many of the criticisms of prewar and occupation policy-making and implementation are valued, if not new. The real benefit of these accounts is that they provide snapshots of fragments of the Iraq story; they do not, however, provide the broader picture that is required to understand the current situation in Iraq. Furthermore, they fail to provide useful advice as to how the situation can now be improved.