Imaginäre Grenzen. Zur Entstehung impliziter Kollektivität in EU-Europa

Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach inspired by the notion of the social imaginary, imaginary borders in the European Union are conceptualized as the public emergence, maintenance and modification of interpretations about European borders through practices of circulation of symbols, commodities, and people. The construction of borders in the EU is thus neither located on the attitudinal level nor conceived of as the deliberate construction of meaning, but as the unintended emergence of the border as a meaningful category from taken-for-granted practices carrying their own meaning. Focusing on twin towns’ activities in the European Union as a paradigmatic location for the articulation of political-cultural understandings of the EU, it is argued that these articulations are not only embedded within economic and social circuits, but in the first place emerge from them as taken-for-granted and imaginary meanings of what the EU as a polity is and where its borders are. Methodologically, this calls for an understanding of the relationship between imaginary political collectivity and its economic, social and cultural channels of circulation which is not conceived as a text-context-relation but as one of mutual imaginary constitution.     

The Relations of the Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with Israel

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. Neither of these republics developed strong nationalist identities and it has been the task of their former communist leaders who are still in power to develop such identities while suppressing internal divisions. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have had a history of tolerance toward their respective Jewish populations, from which many have immigrated to Israel (and the United States) in recent years to unite with family or for economic reasons. Those republics view Israel Diaspora Jews as a source of investment and technological know-how as well as an avenue for better relations with the United States. Conversely, Israel, while considering Russian sensitivities in its relations with Central Asia, values the region as a market for Israeli products, a source for hydrocarbon resources and a way to counteract Iran as well as to seek a more favourable attitude in disputes with the Arabs.     

Chick lit politics in a post-truth era: tricksters,blessees and postfeminist girlpower in Angela Makholwa’s The Blessed Girl

The possibility of an emancipated politics in chick lit novels remains a contested question among postfeminist critics. Drawing on definitions of postfeminism as a transnational sensibility, this article examines South African chick lit in relation to what has been termed post-truth or trickster politics in the context of the rise of politicians, such as Donald Trump. I read Angela Makholwa’s novel The Blessed Girl as an example of African chick lit that features a blessee narrator, a young woman who lives a luxurious lifestyle financed by older men, who is deeply influenced by a Trumpian mode of self-making. By employing a trickster aesthetic and narrative strategies, such as unreliable narration and reader address, the novel, I argue, however also unsettles established parameters of neoliberal girlpower, moving beyond its assumed anti-politicalness, as well as a simple understanding of the blessee figure through either a lens of victimhood or amorality.     

Finanzpolitik als Nachahmungswettbewerb: Empirische Ergebnisse zu Budgetinterdependenzen unter den Schweizer Kantonen

This article examines whether spending decisions in Swiss cantons are interdependent, that is, whether the spending decisions of a canton are influenced by those of other cantons. Theoretically, fiscal policy imitation among cantons can be interpreted as a process of policy and innovation diffusion, as a result of tax competition or as a consequence of federalism as a policy laboratory. The panel analysis presented in this article provides evidence of the existence of budget spillovers among neighbouring cantons. Cantonal governments do not take spending decisions in isolation, but by systematically comparing the fiscal policies in neighbouring cantons.     

The Silent Scream of the Locas in Mariposas en el andamio

This article explores the way cross-dressing has been used as a tool of dissent by queer subjects in the film Mariposas en el andamio . This documentary not only advocates the integration of homosexuals in the realm of Cuban society, but also evidences the establishment of a culture of transvestism on the island. The ultimate intention of Mariposas is to posit the male-to-female transvestite as a figure that contests hegemonic heteronormativity as well as the machista values predicated by the Cuban revolution. The film not only opposes sexist heteronormativity (machismo in Latin American societies), but also establishes a link between homosexuality and cross-dressing practices in Latin America, as transvestism becomes an externalisation of these individuals' homosexual identity. Furthermore, the film seems to suggest that the transvestites feel trapped in the wrong biological sex. The second focus of this article is on the geographical spaces where such transvestic practices are permissible on the island. Although the film makes a case for a more open and inclusive Cuban society, it fails to show that same-sex desire and cross-dressing can be played out outside the neighbourhood's canteen in which the show takes place. Finally, I intend to show how camp becomes the best strategy for the transvestites to challenge the idea of homosexuals as anti-revolutionary figures as well as Latin American heteronormativity. To this end, I engage in a study of a strategy of gender subversion that I call 'camp fuck'. This type of campness de-constructs the idea of a bourgeois camp to transform it into a more political device, which permits the contesting of heteronormativity through elements that have traditionally been regarded as frivolous and apolitical.     

The Commonwealth in the 21st Century

The Commonwealth in the Twenty-First Century finds itself in a difficult predicament. Neither in the 'Global North' nor the post-colonial 'South' do its stakeholders invest in the organisation as a key instrument for international governance. The space which it once occupied as a mediator between rich and poor nations has either closed or been taken over by other entities. But might the Commonwealth find a new role for itself by returning to its roots as a vehicle for the exploration of the commonweal, in particular as a focus of contemporary attempts to democratize the international system? The story of the Commonwealth itself, from its origins as project for a racial imperial oligarchy in the nineteenth century to struggles for its renegotiation as a space of equality, first of 'white dominions' with Britain, and second in the era of Decolonization, is a parable of how rights and participation can be widened. Might the Commonwealth in the Twenty-First century not drive new global conversations about inequality, social and economic rights, and different cosmopolitan futures?     

A Turk of the West: Sir Edgar Vincent's Career in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire

This article examines the concept of the ‘gentleman capitalist’, as embodied by the career of Sir Edgar Vincent (1857–1941), arguing that a career as a financier was not incompatible with the status of a gentleman in Victorian Britain. From the 1830s, both the City of London and the British government agreed on free trade as the bedrock of British commercial policy, and the use of financial power as a means of extending both formal and informal empire. The life of Sir Edgar Vincent is discussed in detail, particularly his period in Egypt as Financial Adviser to the Khedive and in Constantinople as Director-General of the Imperial Ottoman Bank. The article concludes that Sir Edgar believed absolutely in Britain's civilizing mission in the Middle East, promoting her interests whenever possible, but equally that he had no qualms about using his official position for financial gain.     

African tourist art as tradition and product of the postcolonial exotic

ABSTRACT

Figurative art made in Central and West Africa for the global market is a form of tourist art – a category that has been plagued in art historical research by misconstrued concepts such as the authenticity of traditional/precolonial art. Following its categorisation as a commodity, studies focused on the decontextualisation of the object, thus marginalising the producing culture. In this article I investigate the role of the artist in preserving tradition and the role of the trader who, as cultural broker, exoticises the object. Since it can be argued that these are acts of decolonising, African tourist art can be regarded as a product of the postcolonial exotic, as defned by Graham Huggan (2001). Accepting the inescapability of postcoloniality, tourist art can be repositioned as a successful attempt to preserve and promote African cultural traditions and identity in the new era.     

Self-Restraint in Search of Legitimacy: The Reform of the Argentine Supreme Court

In 2003, the Argentine executive promoted a process of Supreme Court reform that entailed limiting presidential attributions in the selection of justices. Then the renewed court implemented changes to its internal procedures that increased its own accountability mechanisms. The literature on the politics of institutional judicial independence in Latin America has developed two explanatory models: one presents reforms as an insurance policy, the other as a consequence of divided government. Both perspectives conceive of reforms as a result of political competition and as a way to limit other actors, the future government in the first case, the party in power in the second. This study, by contrast, explains the Argentine reforms as movements of strategic self-restriction, designed to build legitimacy and credibility, for the government and the court, respectively, in a context of social and institutional crisis and pressure from civil society.     

In their image: The Vietnamese Communist Party,the “West” and the social evils campaign of 1996

Abstract

This article analyzes the production of English-language and Vietnamese-language state-owned newspaper reports that appeared in the early days of the “social evils campaign” in Vietnam in January and February 1996. While the English-language coverage attempts to depict the campaign as an attempt to create a drug-free, able-bodied workforce in compliance with international anti-trafficking efforts, the Vietnamese-language coverage portrays the campaign as an attempt to fight against decadent and corrupt “Western values” in order to reinvent the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) as the gatekeeper of Vietnamese tradition. These depictions serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they can be seen as an attempt by the VCP to walk a fine line to avoid the alienation of the expatriate community while at the same time reconstituting itself as a significant institution in the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. At another level, the social evils campaign demonstrates that neither an easy invocation of “democratization theory” nor a call to arms against Eurocentrism and an affirmation of the particularity of the “East” is sufficient to analyze under what conditions purportedly “Communist” parties might survive and grow vibrant in an age of globalization. Rather, it is important to note the role of the West not as an actual entity but as an imagined phenomenon against which a pure, Eastern tradition is constructed. In other words, the Vietnamese Communist Party uses the social evils campaign to construct the “West” as a phantasmic “straw man” in order to construct itself in the inverted image of the “West,” as “anti-West.” This portrayal is put forward despite the fact that most foreign direct investment in Vietnam comes from East Asian countries and that the businesses singled out in the newspaper articles as the locus of “social evils” were often Japanese-, Korean-, or Vietnamese-owned.     

Remembering 1968 in Mexico: Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco as Documentary Narrative

This article considers Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco [ Massacre in Mexico ] as an example of documentary narrative. It examines the narrative strategies she uses to articulate a tripartite interpretation of the events of 2 October 1968. First, it argues that Poniatowska's text represents the Tlatelolco massacre as a crime against humanity constituted by multiple abuses of human rights. Second, the text is shown to expose the cover-up that occurred as a result of the deliberate manipulation of information by the Mexican state. Third, from a more positive perspective, it is argued that the text represents Tlatelolco as a milestone in the ongoing struggle for democracy. Overall, attention is drawn to the importance of Poniatowska's text in the construction of cultural memory as a counter to official history in narrative representations of this particular trauma in Mexican history.     

The Turkish response to Bulgarian horrors: A study in English Turcophobia

The Jewish Colonization Association organized Jewish rural settlements at the beginning of the twentieth century all over the world. Its colonization effort in Cyprus, although minor and doomed is nevertheless important, as it is widely documented and thus helps to understand essential dynamics and conceptions of the JCA administration.

The present article is based on a report prepared by Jules Rosenheck, a high official of JCA in nearby Palestine, where the JCA's activity was much more intensive. Rosenheck's report reviews a wide scope of local characteristics, from agricultural techniques to medical conditions. On the human scale, it gives a thorough introspection of pettiness and generosity, thriftiness as well as laziness and carelessness. Moreover, the report exposes in detail the inner logic of the JCA, and through it of philanthropie associations in general at that period, about management, technical and agricultural as well as personal. It also contributes to a better understanding of the JCA's conceptions concerning its Palestinian settlements, as Rosenheck refers to them constantly.     

Even honey may become bitter when there is too much of it: Islam and the struggle for a balanced existence in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

In Kyrgyzstan, as in the rest of Central Asia, recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islam. What is perceived as a growing ‘religiosity’ is often seen as a symptom of post-Soviet chaos and excess, but people equally tend to see Islam as an important source of well-being, for themselves and for society as such. It is argued that a general feature of the Islam many Muslims strive for – and occasionally experience glimpses of – is one that expresses, embodies and enables a balanced existence: a balance between well-being in this world and in the afterlife; a balance between the acceptance of one's fate and the attempt to improve one's situation; or a balance between adherence to abstract dogmas and respect for local moralities.     

La confection de diplômes à croix suisse. Standardisation des certifications et construction du national dans l'espace helvétique de la fin du 19e siècle

Which actors initiate or prevent the unification of diploma and what is at stake? How does the state intervene in the reglementation of curricula? This article studies under a socio‐historical angle the nationalisation of certification procedures within the framework of a political sociology approach. It analyses processes of nationalisation as well as nationally differenciated forms of public intervention. Taking as a focal point the nationalisation of lawyer's diploma and vocational training certificates, the article compares the professionalisation of legal and vocational training in Switzerland. It shows that the constitution of a national public sphere materialises through a process of professional interests unification. This implies divisions among professionals as well as among public authorities. The constitution of a national public sphere is not considered as a matter of simple political oppositions but as a conflicting process which challenges the professionalisation of several professionlsectors and the modalities of public action.     

The Extraordinary Politics of the Tunisian Revolution: The Process of Constitution Making

To understand the current stalemate in the drafting process of the Tunisian constitution, it is important to fathom the path Tunisia has chosen to walk since President Ben Ali fled the country. This article apprehends the post-Ben Ali era as a period of extraordinary politics, i.e. a moment of explicit self-institution of society in which popular participation, following Kalyvas' analysis, aims to transform the institutions of state as well as social imaginaries, cultural orientations and economic structures. It analyses the period following Ben Ali's departure as one in which the organization of free elections and the writing of a new constitution by an elected Constituent Assembly not as a technical process of institution-building aimed at creating a new political system, but as a re-constitutive phase of the political. This phase aims at the radical transformation of power relations within state and society and strives for the re-invention of society itself.     

Introductory Comment on the Consequences of Chernobyl'

Property rights in the new phase of economic reforms in the Soviet Union are reviewed and analyzed by a prominent British economist. The paper details laws and decrees on leasing, land, inventions, joint-stock companies, securities, hard currencies, markets, small business, a state holding company, foreign investment, banking, taxation, monopolies, as well as on property ownership and business units in general. The main federal measures are then compared with relevant provisions in the so-called Shatalin Plan. Included in the effort is a section on terminology pertaining to destatization as well as an assessment of the process of privatization as of early December 1990. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124, 612.     

Farewell My Country? Hermannsburg,Gus Williams,and the Indigenised Heimatlied

This microhistory focuses on a little-known aspect of Indigenous musical life in the 1960s in the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission (now Ntaria) in Central Australia. I contemplate the possible meanings arising when Gus and Rhonda Williams translated the secular German Heimat- cum-Wanderlied [song of home-cum-wandering], “Ade du mein Heimatland”, [Farewell to you my homeland], into Arrarnta as “Ade pmara nukai” [Farewell my country], and “presenced Indigeneity” for a predominantly non-Indigenous, southern audience. I explore how a German song became “travelling culture”; how it was received and modified to suit both missionary and Indigenous purposes, in the process both expressing a vernacularised Arrarnta Lutheranism, as well as maintaining music’s vital role in Indigenous culture, including as a signifier of love of country. I further examine how the song could have a political meaning in the nascent land rights context of the day, as an assertion of attachment to country or “Indigenous Heimat” that could resonate back, across a cultural divide, with a non-Indigenous Lutheran audience.     

Organisierte Zivilgesellschaft im EU-Verfassungsprozess: Partner des Regierens oder Konstituent politischer Ordnung?

A new role has been ascribed to civil society within the EU-constitutional process. It is not only regarded as a partner in governance but also as a constituent of the emerging EU-polity. Civil society appears in this process primarily as the structure of voice that is articulated in relation to EU-governance and that claims to represent European citizens. The article proposes an analytical framework and a methodology of how to analyze civil society in its role as constituency. The research agenda is linked to the intermediary and the representative function of organised civil society as a transmission belt of legitimatory discourse on the EU. In order to reconstruct how potential interests, identities and normative ideas relating to the legitimacy of a EU constitutional order are contested within national politics, our research draws on a survey of German civil society organisations in three sectors: a) consumer interest organisations, b) churches and religious organisations, and c) women and gender equality groups.     

A New Asian Order and the Role of Japan

China is changing the international order in East Asia. It is not only a matter of a power transition, but also a matter of a change in the international system. Chinese people tend to see the world order in hierarchical terms as they did for centuries; nationalism is used as a tool of national integration; and government control of the military is weakening. These are the factors behind the rise of China. If these trends continue, a hierarchical order with China as hegemon might be established in East Asia. It seems as if we are returning to the period before the nineteenth century when China led the world. However, the international order in the twenty-first century has to be based upon such principles as the rule of law, peaceful solution of conflict, democracy, and human rights. In order to establish such an order, Japan and other countries that have committed to those values should unite firmly. China also would benefit very much from that order in the long run.     

Multialignment and Indian Foreign Policy under Narendra Modi

This article examines India’s emerging approach to foreign policy: multialignment. It argues that since the mid-2000s India has developed multialignment as a means of achieving what it perceives as its core interests and ideals in international relations. Characterised by an emphasis on engagement in regional multilateral institutions, the use of strategic partnerships, and what is termed ‘normative hedging’, multialignment is being utilised to boost India’s economic development and national security, as well as to project influence and promote its values. The article traces the emergence of this strategy during the governments of Manmohan Singh and its implementation and extension by the new government of Narendra Modi. It analyses the key arguments that have been presented in its favour and the ways in which it was been put into practice. It concludes with a brief assessment of multialignment as a strategy, as well as the prospect that it will deliver the dividends expected by India’s foreign policy elite.