A Quiet Revolution in Diplomacy: Quebec–UK Relations Since 1960

ABSTRACT

Quebec’s modern international outlook and its current paradiplomacy can be dated largely from the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Since then, the provincial government in Quebec City and the federal government in Ottawa have had to tread a fine line in accommodating each other’s constitutional rights in the field of international relations—a line that has occasionally been breached, especially in the years following the Quiet Revolution and in critical periods such as those prior to the 1980 and 1995 referenda. Foreign governments have also had to engage in careful diplomacy in order to avoid upsetting either Ottawa or Quebec City—and this has been especially true in the case of the countries historically most involved with Canada and Quebec—France, the United States, and Britain. But whereas there has been some academic writing on Quebec’s relationships with France and the United States, very little attention has been devoted to Quebec–UK relations since the Quiet Revolution. This article seeks to fill that gap and argues that the Quebec–UK relationship since the 1960s can itself best be characterized as a “quiet revolution” in diplomacy that has largely avoided the controversies that have sometimes dogged Quebec’s relations with France and the United States.     

试论塞瑟尔的"新君主制"学说

在文艺复兴时期的西欧,法国的宫廷大臣、著名的政治思想家克劳德·得·塞瑟尔根据现实社会的变动,提出了系统的"新君主制"学说.在肯定君主制的价值时,他鼓吹"王权神授",但却着重于从人性的角度来强调君主制的优越性.在对"明君政治"的憧憬中,他界定了一些君主应当遵循的政治行为规范,特别强调君主实施仁政,建立各等级之间的"和谐"秩序,并提出了等级变动的合理性.同时,塞瑟尔主张君主让各等级代表参政议政,建立"君主咨政会议制".他还提出"有限君权"的主张,力图以教会、"正义"与国家法令来遏止君主的暴政.此外,他还要求君主灵活地进行外交,积极进行殖民扩张.塞氏的政治学说充满着"过渡时期"社会所赋予的复杂性与矛盾性,但受时代变迁的感召与人文主义的熏陶,他突破传统的藩篱,提出了适应民族国家发展与新兴资产阶级成长之需要的"新君主制"学说.他的政治理想,反映了西方政治思想从中世纪向近代转型的历史趋势.     

从流民法看都铎时期议会与王权的关系

都铎时期是英国从中世纪封建社会向近代资本主义社会过渡的历史大变革时期。英国虽确立了君主专制制度,但国王在政策上仍需要议会的支持,议会亦需要王权的保护。这种“互助”的关系也反映在流民立法上。当英国出现严重的流民问题时,议会颁布的一系列法令法规中充分体现了国王的意志。因此,无论是“血腥立法”还是“社会福利”立法,其根本目的都是解决社会危机,避免发生动乱,稳固统治,在这一点上议会与国土的利益是一致的,国王与议会的关系是对立统一的。     

“SEEING” THE PAST: TEXT AND QUESTIONS OF HISTORY IN THE RĀJATARAṄGIṆĪ

Traditional scholarly opinion has regarded Kalha?a's Rājatara?gi?ī, the twelfth‐century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmiri kings, as a work of history. This essay proposes a reinvestigation of the nature of the iconic text from outside the shadow of that label. It first closely critiques the positivist “history hypothesis,” exposing its internal contradictions over questions of chronology, causality, and objectivity as attributed to the text. It then argues that more than an empiricist historical account that modern historians like to believe it is—in the process bracketing out integral rhetorical, mythic, and didactic parts of the text—the Rājatara?gi?ī should be viewed in totality for the kāvya (epic poem) that it is, which is to say, as representing a specific language practice that sought to produce meaning and articulated the poet's vision of the land and its lineages. The essay thus urges momentarily reclaiming the text from the hegemonic but troubled understanding of it as history—only to restore it ultimately to a more cohesive notion of historicality that is consistent with its contents. Toward this end, it highlights the concrete claim to epistemic authority that is asserted both by the genre of Sanskrit kāvya generally and by the Rājatara?gi?ī in particular, and their conception of the poetic “production” of the past that bears a striking resonance with constructivist historiography. It then traces the intensely intertextual and value‐laden nature of the epistemology that frames the Rājatara?gi?ī into a narrative discourse on power and ethical governance. It is in its narrativity and discursivity—its meaningful representation of what constitutes “true” knowledge of time and human action—that the salience of the Rājatara?gi?ī may lie.     

Dryden’s Virgilian Kings

This essay discusses the forms of kingship which Dryden represents in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.     

The Rejected Candidate: John III Vasa,the Polish-Lithuanian royal elections (1573/1575) and early-modern political decision-making

This article analyses the candidacy of King John III Vasa in the royal elections of Poland-Lithuania in 1573 and 1575. Although the ‘Polish-minded’ policy of John Vasa is commonly known in earlier historiography, Swedish and Finnish historians have not given much attention to John III’s election campaigns in Poland-Lithuania in the 1570s. This article contemplates John III’s candidacy and rejection from the perspective of Poland-Lithuania. The royal elections are analysed as a political decision-making process by the Polish-Lithuanian estates. Thus the article emphasizes the existence of past alternatives and conditions of decision-making in early-modern history.     

论明万历中后期言官对神宗的批判

明万历中后期,以言官为首的官僚集团兴起了一股批判明神宗的风潮。其根本缘由,首先是神宗君德严重缺失,其次在于言官勇于以道事君。在深层次上,这种批判也是该时期政局危殆、皇权变异并衰落以及士风日下、部分言官沽名钓誉等社会变动综合作用的结果。尽管这种批判并未摆脱传统的“尊君—罪君”的政治评判模式,但它是明清之际启蒙思想的先导和重要的思想资源。     

Law,Principle, and the Theologico-Political History of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the possibility of political theology within Christianity, and in response, offers a conceptual-historical portrait of sovereignty and its juridical dimensions. Beginning with the introduction of Roman law into the medieval Church, the article traces the logic of “legal principle” as the basis of sovereign decision and how the form of legal distinctions adopted into canon law translate the Romanitas of law into the theory of papal sovereignty. By the Romanitas of law, that is to say the principle of sovereignty in law. The article then seeks to describe the conceptual translations of Roman politics and Stoic metaphysics into theological form and the logic of this translation into medieval natural law. The article concludes by evaluating how the civic theology of Rome is conceptually inherited by the politics and legal framework of sovereignty and returns to Peterson’s critique of Schmitt, arguing that political theology can be understood as a dynamic where politics is theologized, assuming that in the history of religion, theology and politics are never fully distinct to begin with.     

The many Robespierres from 1794 to the present

The Belgian Constitution of 1831 marked a decisive step in the continental evolution from Restoration constitutional monarchy, based on the monarchical principle, towards the establishment of parliamentary constitutional monarchy. At the time, the new balance of power desired by the Belgian revolutionaries was captured by the phrase ‘republican monarchy’. It is remarkable that this concept, despite being so central to the founding fathers’ deliberations, has hardly been commented upon by later historians and public lawyers. This article aims to reconstruct the origin, meaning and uses of this concept in the context of the 1830 revolutionary wave. French revolutionary veteran general Lafayette was responsible for popularizing republican monarchy in the July Revolution, although the term’s origins went back to eighteenth-century debates on the reform of absolute monarchy. Lafayette used it to summarize the institutional demands of the republican movement vis-à-vis king Louis Philippe. Its transnational migration to the Belgian context subsequently entailed a shift in meaning which will be charted through an analysis of the Belgian constituent and public debates. Finally, the reasons for the concept’s sudden disappearance from the political stage will be addressed.     

Dying for the fatherland: Thomas Abbt's theory of aesthetic patriotism

This article aims to dissect Thomas Abbt's (1738–1766) theory of aesthetic patriotism as laid out in his On Dying for the Fatherland (1761) and his prize-essay On Mathematical, Metaphysical and Moral Certainty (1763). Aesthetic idioms, such as the emphasis on the intrinsic pleasure from the order and beauty of virtue, had been invoked throughout the eighteenth century to vindicate the morally optimistic view of humanity against the sceptical vision of an exclusively utility-centred mankind. In the post-Montesquieu debates on the moral foundations of modern politics, German-speaking authors in particular, from both republics (Switzerland) and monarchies (Prussia), appropriated the aesthetic idioms in order to reject those theories which grounded patriotism in some sort of self-interest or proclaimed it redundant in modern society. Thomas Abbt was one of the most prominent representatives of this intellectual position. Combining the general emphasis of Shaftesbury on the role of aesthetic appreciation in moral and political agency with the more specific German Baumgartenian analysis of ‘beauty’ as a central principle in human ‘empirical psychology’, Abbt argued that patriotism in modern monarchies could be grounded in an aesthetic passion of enthusiasm generated through sensuous examples of great virtue. The example of a king fighting for his country on the battlefield could inspire monarchical subjects to follow his example as well as regenerate patriotism among them. Abbt was adamant that patriotism based on aesthetic foundations had to be supported and stabilised by a pervasive patriotic culture of remembrance and emulation of dead heroes through the fine arts, as well as by a system of meritocratic honour in the army.