The Chinese peasantry and imperialism: A critique of Chalmers Johnson's peasant nationalism and communist power

Abstract

Chalmers Johnson's book Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power is important for several reasons. It is a complete reinterpretation of events of the Chinese revolution, presenting the revolution as merely another form of nationalist development of the modern nation-state. And it has had an enormous impact in the academic community. Most of the major works on this period of Chinese history are to some extent answers to Johnson. And its effect has extended beyond the field of Chinese studies. Almost all other studies of peasant mass movements and contemporary social change at least acknowledge Johnson's thesis and make some attempt to deal with it.     

Source material on Philippine revolutionary movements

Abstract

For the American Asian scholar, the research and writing of Philippine history is still in its virginal stages. Both in the United States and in the Philippines itself the study of that history has progressed little deeper than the officially-expressed record, in which the viewpoint of dominant interests has prevailed. Neglected in particular have been the revolutionary forces and movements that have played such a central part in the Philippines for the past century.     

Unthawed: post-Cold War economic ties between Kaliningrad and Europe

ABSTRACT

Kaliningrad’s post-Soviet economic interconnection with Europe is encountering obstacles due to specific Russian governmental idiosyncrasies as well as its particular regional challenges. In essence, the Kremlin’s direct control from afar and European misgivings have influenced the territory’s economic development in relation to Europe. The distance of the region from Russia, exclave status, large size for an exclave, and conflicted history subject the area to contradictory forces. On the one hand, it links Kaliningrad to Europe because of a shared history and geography. On the other, it promotes a sense of political instability and geographical isolation that discourages economic integration with Europe.     

Review Essay

Abstract

So far in modern world history, social revolutions, though they have entailed elements of class conflict, have plainly not conformed to Marx's theoretical expectations or moral vision. They have occurred in agrarian countries caught behind foreign competitors, not in the most advanced capitalist industrial nations. And even those revolutions that have expropriated domestic capitalist classes in the name of socialist ideals have hardly resulted to date in the prosperous, democratic communist societies envisaged by Marx. (Skocpol, p. 292)     

Laos: “no place to hide”

Abstract

If the U.S. intervenes in the third world in the next decade it is likely to model its actions on experience in Laos rather than to duplicate the frustrations of Vietnam. While the two wars are similar in terms of destruction and dislocation of civilian populations (with Laos having sustained even greater devastation than Vietnam), the strategies directing them differ significantly. For in Laos, without introducing its own combat troops, the U.S. has secretly waged a more extensive war on foreign soil than any other nation in history. Incorporating the lessons of Vietnam, synthesizing previous Western experience in counter-insurgency, and operating almost exclusively through executive decrees, the American military in Laos has devised a pattern of warfare likely to become the quintessential model for future attempts to fight localized guerilla conflicts.     

After and Beyond Amoral Familism: The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Social Capital Italian-style

Abstract

The economic crisis that began with the great crash of 2008 has brought about a significant increase in inequality in Italy between individuals and families as well as between different geographic areas. A higher degree of inequality has had negative effects on social capital, reducing so-called bridging and linking elements of social capital while strengthening bonding elements, with a concomitant decline in civic culture. These effects can be dangerous for democracy, in so far as they lower the citizens’ trust in institutions. Since social capital is created as well as destroyed by political and social actors, a relevant question is whether these actors have had a role in transforming social capital into trust in institutions. From an analysis of the changes that have taken place in the Italian political system, it would appear that a significant segment of the political system has destroyed more institutional social capital than it has helped to create.     

Good governance as a precondition for subsidiarity: human rights litigation in Nigeria and ECOWAS

ABSTRACT

Similar to the European Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) evolved gradually from little more than a customs union to a supranational organisation with sophisticated governance arrangements. As a consequence, subsidiarity has become an inevitable adjustment mechanism to align individual member state policies with objectives of the Community as a whole. In particular, since the inclusion of a protocol on good governance and democracy in 2001 an increasing number of policy areas require a delineation of competencies between state and Community organs. Moreover, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice confines itself to the vertical application of human rights law and does not accept human rights claims against private persons since the extension of its mandate in 2005. Many cases involving the Federal Republic of Nigeria illustrate well a double procedural effect of the principle of subsidiarity in the human rights litigation within the ECOWAS legal order.     

Neither inside nor outside the corridors of power: prosaic petitioning and the royal burghs in early modern Scotland

ABSTRACT

This article explores early modern petitioning in the context of urban Scotland. It focuses on prosaic rather than political petitioning, on the basis that the former was more truly characteristic of what the purpose of petitioning was understood to be by most of those who engaged in it. The burghs of Scotland provide an added dimension to the history of petitioning because of the role of their national assembly (the Convention of Royal Burghs), which was simultaneously a recipient of petitions, a conduit for its members’ petitions to the crown, and a petitioner of the crown in its own right. This article also reveals how changing practices of petitioning shed light on the development of the early modern Scottish state, as the Convention of Royal Burghs found its members increasingly bypassing it and instead they resorted directly to central government institutions.     

Antithesis – the reconstruction of the African Union for a viable and sustainable solution for the unity of Africans

ABSTRACT

Franz Fanon, the Algerian revolutionary of African descent, once declared: ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.’ The challenge confronting African researchers on matters related to the Afro-Arab borderlands – regions spanning Tchad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and the Sudan where the African and Arab worlds meet – centre on resolving, reversing and undoing historical denials and inaccuracies. This article critically reviews the falsification of history in this part of Africa, in the Sudan in particular, and the role of the Arab League, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the Organisation of African Unity and its successor the African Union, in addressing the plight of its inhabitants. The article concludes with the recommendation of the creation of a new, culturally based Pan-African organisation able to fill a void and offer redress.     

Die Ausbildung bäuerlicher Landschaften im Raum der Eidgenossenschaft

Summary

The Development of Peasant Communities in the Helvetic Confederation

Traditional Swiss historiography saw the history of the cantons as a fight by burghers and peasants for freedom against feudal rule. More recently this black and white picture has been modified by showing that the urban cantons, notably Bern, Zurich and Lucerne, pursued a traditional city‐state policy of territorial expansion and subjection of the peasantry. This picture, in its turn, is now being shown as too extreme since it does not account for the development of the Swiss Confederation and for its evident attraction to communities beyond its borders. A study of the Oberland of Bern shows that, especially in the fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, village and peasant communities were able to get rid of serfdom and acquire from their local feudal lords extensive rights of self‐government and judicial authority, with a displacement of feudal law by common law (Landgesetz). The city of Bern supported these developments. While more detailed studies are required for other parts of Switzerland, it looks as if this development may well have been common.     

Speaking the Unspeakable,Naming the Unnameable: The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

The establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse followed years of lobbying by survivor groups, damning findings from previous inquiries, and increasing societal recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by child sexual abuse. Through extensive media coverage, the Royal Commission brought into public view the reality that the sexual abuse of children was widespread, and its recommendations are prompting organisational, policy, and legislative reform. This article explores the background to the Royal Commission, situating it within the history of previous inquiries and growing community outrage at the failure of institutions to adequately protect children and respond appropriately when abuse occurs. The article explores the ways in which the Royal Commission, more so than previous inquiries, brought child sexual abuse into public discourse. It also serves as an introduction to this special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, which illustrates how the Royal Commission has fostered new scholarship across a range of disciplines as researchers engage with complex issues related to institutional child sexual abuse, its history, causes, impacts, and the important role of inquiries in confronting it.     

The mitsui empire

Abstract

By any standards the House of Mitsui is a remarkable phenomenon. Started 350 years ago as a small provincial Japanese brewing business, it has survived countless wars, calamities of all kinds, changes of government and of system of government, and remains today one of the greatest business, banking and trading conglomerates in Japan. It is also, of course, a multinational giant. A history of the house and of the firm (from which actually the family has now virtually resigned) therefore offers a convenient and manageable frame for a look at some of the long-term developments within the Japanese state and economy. Since it is the kind of perspective from which most academic specialists on Japan shy away, this is therefore a book to be welcomed, the more so since its author is one of the best and best-known journalists writing about Japan, widely known for his thoughtful and incisive pieces in the Far Eastern Economic Review especially.     

Parliaments and the future

SUMMARY

In this article, Izmail Sharifzhanov examines a short period of Tatar parliamentary history—its last fifteen years (1990–2005). These years were crucial ones indeed: first, they coincided with tremendous events in Russian history on the threshold of the twenty-first century and, second, they had decisive consequences for Tatar history itself. They aroused great enthusiasm among the Tatar people: for the first time in its tsarist and Soviet history it could hope to achieve real national sovereignty, but it proved, as usual, that these expectations were vain. Moscow and the local bureaucratic elite did their utmost to restrain a radical national movement and establish their power in the republic. The parliament again lost its initial rebellious spirit and political independence.     

National news briefs

Abstract

Among the more puzzling hiatuses in the study of postwar Japan as well as postwar Pacific capitalism has been the relative paucity of scholarship on the occupation of 1945-1952. Puzzling because it can be argued that the contours of the contemporary Japanese state were significantly shaped (or not reshapen) in these years. Puzzling because the occupation and the two succeeding years which capped it with the Mutual Security Agreement offer an exceptional insight into an international neo-capitalist nexus in the making—with all its hesitancy, cul-de-sacs, tangled ganglions, and dynamics. And puzzling also because there is a wealth of discrete material on the subject available in English, much of which has been around for a long while, and virtually no one has yet tried to piece it together systematically.     

The G.I. movement in Asia

Abstract

The War against Vietnam has done much to America. It has weakened the economy. It has aggravated social tensions. And it has opened the way for large numbers of Americans to see the racism, the imperialism and the genocide that is so pervasive and yet so deeply buried in American history. By fighting so successfully, the Vietnamese people have helped Americans make a space for revolutionary thought and revolutionary politics in America. While it is true that the American left has been largely unable to take advantage of the widespread discontent that the War has created, there has been a significant erosion in the effectiveness of many American institutions. Central among these institutions is the military. When the values and interests of a ruling class are seriously challenged, its political power does come out of the barrel of a gun; and so the fading effectiveness of the American military is of the deepest concern to America’s “leaders.”     

Austerity versus pragmatism: a comparison of Latvian and Polish economic policies during the great recession and their consequences ten years later

ABSTRACT

Despite many initial similarities, Latvia and Poland represent two opposite extremes in terms of practical and theoretical approaches to the economic crisis. The Polish government applied a ‘pragmatic’ approach to fight the recession, based on expansionary fiscal policies and currency devaluation. Conversely, the Latvian administration opted for the Austerity and internal devaluation strategy. Consequently, the objective of this paper is to analyze, from the perspective of political economy, the strategies chosen for the economic crisis management and their effects in Latvia and Poland, in light of the main EU narratives about its causes and responses. The research contends that the economic performance of both countries during the crisis was due to their respective economic structures. On the one hand, Poland is a bigger, more diversified and industrialized economy, with fewer channels of vulnerability and could apply expansionary policies effectively. On the contrary, the economic model established in Latvia generated a high exposure to external shocks, in particular, with a double vulnerability in the banking sector. In this context, due to internal and external motives, the Latvian government decided to apply the austerity and internal devaluation strategy, worsening the economic decline and the subsequent recovery.     

PROGRAMME CIHAE/ICHRPI – PROGRAM ICHRPI/CIHAE

SUMMARY

In this article a set of sources and methodology are presented for analyzing contemporary Parliaments, based on a case study focusing on the representatives of some of the different parliamentary chambers constituted during the period of the Spanish Transition (1977–82). The use of oral sources is emphasized in particular, since a sound understanding and management of these historiographical sources is a requirement set by the specific characteristics of what is known as the history of the present, in order to obtain information for its study. Moreover, oral history sources acquire a greater degree of importance in this study, as they form a vital element for the broadest possible form of micro-biographies of parliamentarians that will later allow for an in-depth prosopographical study.     

Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of “Research”

Abstract

Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966, supposedly acting on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. It is one of the strangest facts in South African history; it is also, of course, a kind of fiction, and one that has been refracted into a range of literary and artistic works. Reading across both official and “creative” archives, I address a range of methodological problems that I encountered in attempting an academic treatment of Tsafendas and his (as the presiding apartheid judge put it) “useless life”.     

“Never Again!” Women Hibakusha in Osaka

Abstract

In August 1945, the United States attacked the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the most catastrophic weapon in history: atomic bombs that caused more than 210,000 deaths by the end of 1945 (35 percent of the Hiroshima population and 25 percent in Nagasaki), and severe suffering for a large number of the more than 370,000 survivors.     

Individuals,Parties and the Parliamentary Record in the 1690s

SUMMARY

In this article Colin Brooks reviews the historical writing of the last thirty years on British history between 1688 and 1714. This has offered a variety of interpretations which give priority to a number of different factors. The problem now facing historians is how to synthesize these interpretations into a coherent account. The article suggests that while it is possible to reconstruct from the surviving source materials what happened in the House of Commons, the incompleteness and the ambiguities of the evidence make it much more difficult to determine why it happened, or what were the motives of the individuals taking part. The nature of the source materials requires that they be interpreted with more caution than they have often received: they have as much to tell about individual perceptions as about what actually happened.