From faith to race? ‘Mixed marriage’ and the politics of difference in Imperial Germany

ABSTRACT

Intermarriage was a key site for testing politics of difference within the multicultural German Empire. Across the German states in the mid-nineteenth century, marriage between members of different religions frequently proved impossible. Until various civil marriage laws were introduced between the 1840s and 1870s, marriage remained within the remit of the church. As a consequence, marrying across confessional lines was rarely permitted. The implications were clear: marriage was seen as the embodiment of one’s culture – defined primarily in confessional (alongside socio-economic) terms, and it was also viewed as a key transmitter of culture by producing new generations of faithful observers of particular denominations. As a country divided between three confessions, religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Germany proved an important aspect of difference within the new German nation state. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the introduction of civil marriage, mass waves of migration, the growth of urbanization and the expansion of the German overseas empire, the connotation of ‘mixed marriage’ in Germany appeared to have shifted. It remained a code for crossing confessional lines, but its resonance had changed. By the late nineteenth century, ‘mixed marriage’ had come to characterize another kind of cultural mixing as well: that between races, both at home within Germany and abroad within its colonies and diasporic outposts. And, between 1905 and 1912, ‘mixed marriage’ between Germans and ‘natives’ had been banned in German Southwest Africa, East Africa and Samoa. Why and how was intermarriage a flashpoint in debates on German identity politics at the turn of the twentieth century? As this article shows, intermarriage in the German Empire mattered to families, broader communities, and legislators because it was a pivotal means through which social groups formed, interacted and maintained boundaries at a time when visions of Germany were expanding.     

Structuration Theory and Wrongful Imprisonment: From ‘Victimhood’ to ‘Survivorship’?

Building on existing research from a zemiological approach, this article seeks to contribute to a more ontological understanding of the production and reproduction of harms associated with wrongful imprisonment in England and Wales. Drawing from Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, it is argued that whilst the harms of wrongful imprisonment are both complex and devastating, victims need not be perceived as entirely passive. Rather, victims of wrongful imprisonment can be viewed as knowledgeable agents with the intrinsic capacity and agency to strategically cope with and even survive the harms that they experience. The article concludes with personal accounts by victims of wrongful imprisonment that form an identifiable ‘survivor’ discourse to highlight some of the key critical factors that are vital in helping victims of wrongful imprisonment to re-structure their lives after release.     

‘From weird to wired’: MPs,the internet and representative politics in the UK

On 14 May 2002, the House of Commons voted on proposals put forward by the Modernisation Select Committee for reform of the departmental select committee system. This article examines the origins of those proposals, and the outcome of the vote, focusing on one particular proposal to create a Committee of Nomination to place MPs onto select committees. This raises questions regarding two competing academic approaches to explaining parliamentary reform, the ‘attitudinal’ approach and the ‘contextual’ approach, and concludes that, of the two, the ‘contextual’ approach is better placed to explain the failure to create a Committee of Nomination.     

Reaching out to the people? Assessing the relationship between parliament and citizens in Finland

Despite the Open Government (Parliament) initiatives and notions of a ‘democratic parliament’, the relationship between legislatures and citizens remains seriously under-researched. This article introduces a comprehensive analytical framework, combining the normative principles of visibility, accessibility, and permeability with practical indicators (parliament as public space, sharing of information, contact with MPs, media and digital engagement, transparency of legislative process, and actual participation in legislative decision-making) for assessing the public engagement of parliaments. Applying this framework to the Finnish Eduskunta, the authors show that despite recent reforms that have partially ‘opened up’ parliamentary proceedings and attempted to connect citizens to democratic process, there remains scope for reforms and innovations. The Eduskunta should embrace a more positive approach towards new forms of civic participation, particularly regarding how its influential committees operate. The findings reflect the tensions between, or the difficulties in reconciling, traditional forms of representative democracy with alternative and more direct channels of political participation.     

Constructing a New Scottish parliament for the ‘Europe of regions’: Can institutional engineering assure subsidiarity?

The creation of an elected parliament in Scotland raises questions for legislative scholars, among them how a parliamentary body representing a stateless nation within a member state of the European Union can influence and implement European legislation. One version of the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ states that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen, encouraging assemblies throughout the EU to articulate and implement their own preferences in key policy areas. Reporting findings from a survey of the Scottish parliament's first cohort of legislators, this article identifies conflicting perceptions of subsidiarity, charts how best to pursue it, and evaluates the institutional norms, rules and procedures put in place to help secure it. Data demonstrate that preferences vary by level of MSP knowledge about European policy, by party membership and by method of election. Low levels of legislator knowledge combined with internal divisiveness constitute barriers to institutional strength in the pursuit of subsidiarity.     

Turning over a new leaf? Cohesion and discipline in the Italian parliament

The literature on parties suggests various hypotheses about the conditions under which the cohesion and discipline of parliamentary parties will be greater or lesser. Since one such hypothesis concerns party‐system characteristics, Italy offers an opportunity to investigate what happens to cohesion and discipline when a system characterised by the permanence in office of a large, centrally located party and based on the permanent exclusion of left and right extremes, is replaced by one characterised by strong bi‐polar tendencies and the alternation in office of two competing coalitions. Italy's transformation appears to have produced more cohesive and disciplined behaviour in parliament.     

Who’s in favour? Same-sex union laws in parliament

The article analyses which parties support registered partnership and same-sex marriage bills in parliament in Western Europe. Existing comparative research indicates that left parties back same-sex union laws. This article shows that support is not limited to the left camp. Liberal and even Christian democratic parties have expressed above-average support as well, albeit with certain exceptions. The chief opponents of same-sex union laws are Protestant parties and the parties of the far right; in terms of numbers, however, both are largely insignificant. Far more relevant for these laws’ chances of success are the positions of the large parties at the centre and at the right of the political spectrum. The analysis reveals considerable inter-country differences in these parties’ attitudes, which can be explained to a large extent with the two-worlds-of-morality-politics distinction introduced by Engeli, Green-Pedersen and Larsen: countries in which centre and right parties continue to oppose same-sex union laws are part of the religious world, with the exception of France. The results for France indicate a need for further research.     

When is a group not a political group? the dissolution of the TDI group in the european parliament

This article is about political groups and non-attached members in the European Parliament (EP). Although the strengthening of the former to the detriment of the latter is an old as well as an incremental phenomenon, it is with the current legislature that the struggle between the two has become a central issue of the EP agenda. The peak is the case of the TDI Group (‘Bonino-Le Pen’), the first political group dissolved by the assembly itself, backed by an unprecedented judgment of the Court of First Instance, on the basis of the lack of political affinities between its members. At the same time as shedding light on the way political groups are conceived and the prerogatives they reserve, this episode emphasises the special imperatives of the EP internal organisation and helps to explain the most recent revision of the Rules of Procedure. The study reveals that over time the EP has increasingly enhanced the role of political groups to an extent that non-attached members consider prejudicial for the full exercise of the democratic mandate; moreover, it shows that the requirement of political affinities to form political groups is formal in nature so that only an explicit denial would entail its actual enforcement, as was the case for the TDI Group; finally, while emphasising that the EP's internal structure needs to be considered in the light of the special legislative role and unique transnational features of the institution itself, it warns that reference to other national models can be misleading.     

Free voting in a provincial parliament: The case of ‘same‐sex’ legislation in Ontario, 1994

Previous research on parliamentary free voting, which has been confined exclusively to national parliaments and almost exclusively to the British House of Commons, has found relatively little constituency impact on members’ voting decisions, even on the most contentious issues of social policy. Since sub‐national parliaments tend to be smaller, less professionalised, and (arguably) ‘closer to the people’, it is possible that a more significant ‘constituency connection’ might be observed in these legislative arenas. This study extends the literature on this topic by empirically examining the fate of a recent homosexual rights bill in the Ontario Legislative Assembly. Contrary to expectations, none of the constituency characteristics used in logistical regression models generates a significant MLE coefficient, suggesting that Canadian provincial legislators may be even less sensitive to constituency preferences than their national counterparts.     

Applying the Responsibility to Protect to the ‘Arab Spring’

The doctrine of the responsibility to protect, since its inception in the ICISS report of 2001, has been the subject of considerable discussion. Arguably its most publicised component is the principle that the international community has the responsibility to protect civilian populations against severe suffering where the relevant national authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. Consequently, the main focus of discourse upon the responsibility to protect has centred on its impact upon the approach of the international community to intervention in respect of situations posing considerable humanitarian crises. The events of the Arab Spring, in which full blown conflict in some states gave rise to serious human suffering, provided a real opportunity for the international community to evaluate the role of the responsibility to protect in decision-making over responding to such instances, and potentially to develop it into a practical and meaningfully implementable concept. However, due to political flaws inherent in the doctrine, and its arguably overstated significance, the doctrine at best played a minimal role in guiding the international response to developments in the Arab World. Nonetheless, responses to the Arab Spring do allow certain conclusions to be drawn in respect of the future relevance of the doctrine.     

From Safety to Danger: Constructions of Crime in a Women’s Magazine

This study examines how the print media constructs signifiers of safety and danger for women. We analyze 155 news articles regarding crime and criminal justice from 1970 to 1990 in Chatelaine magazine, a Canadian women’s periodical. Both content and textual analyses are deployed to evaluate the media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety. We show that the meanings associated with women’s danger and safety in news narratives are socially constructed through claims, sources, content and culture. We find that news reporting did not initially incorporate signifiers of fear. However, crime messages increasingly included images of fear in the later reporting period. We argue that the transformations surrounding these images and texts are influenced by the rise in neoliberal thought in the 1980s. Our results indicate that ideological struggles external to the media are crucial to the representation of crime, which ultimately influence signifiers of danger and safety for women.     

‘Endemic to the species’: ordering the ‘other’ via organised crime

The United States has been the prime mover in the establishment of both the concept of organised crime and the use of the concept in its attempt to establish global hegemony, in which law enforcement became a little more than a front for a government-backed central casting agency, stereotyping both heroes and villains. This article offers an account of how the ‘Other’ has been used as prism for the construction of organised crime primarily in the United States and how this construction, as a franchise, has been exported on the international level and on heterogeneous criminal landscapes.     

Expanding ‘Community’ in the Community Response to Intimate Partner Violence

Community coordination refers to a formalized system of collaboration between various social service agencies to help meet the needs of specific populations. In cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), community coordination includes a system of policies, information sharing, and referrals between the criminal justice system and counseling centers and shelters for survivors. The life model of social work practice suggests that social workers utilize both formal and informal groups as environmental resources for clients. In an effort to address the failures of community coordinated responses to IPV, community needs to be reconceptualized to include these additional groups, especially employers.     

From foreign trade to international investment: a new step in China’s integration with the world economy

China’s economic strategy is facing new challenges arising from the changes in the world economy as well as in its domestic conditions. Given the sluggish global economy and the rise of protectionist policies, China cannot expect external demand to contribute to its economic growth as much as in the past. On the domestic side, the working age population has ceased to increase and will soon diminish; rising domestic costs will force Chinese exporters to shift from price competitiveness to quality upgrading and to build new comparative advantages. An important dimension of China’s new strategy will be the expansion of its direct investment abroad. China which has already become the leading world exporter and has been up to now a major recipient of foreign direct investment is likely to turn out to be a major international investor. China has accumulated large foreign assets which mainly consist of foreign government debt securities and is now aiming at diversifying its external assets through promoting Chinese firms’ investment abroad.     

Whither the ‘new role’ in policy making? Conservative MPs in standing committees, 1979 to 1992

Examining the behaviour of Conservative MPs in 5,306 standing committee divisions between 1979 and 1992, this article determines whether the Commons’ ‘new role’ in policy making, identified by Schwarz in 1980, survived the Thatcher years and Major months. One hundred and forty five Conservative MPs cast 684 dissenting votes in 103 bills, inflicting 56 defeats spread over 29 bills. (A further 11 defeats occurred without Conservative dissent.) The extent and intensity of the dissent is explained, showing why so many dissenting votes did not result in more defeats. Partly this is due to the nature of the dissent (too many isolated rebellions, votes sometimes not cast with the opposition). But mainly it is due to the size of the majorities enjoyed by the Thatcher Government, particularly after 1983, and the Government's ability to control the size of committees. Because of this, in both absolute and relative terms the dissent from 1979 to 1992 is less effective than that identified by Schwarz.     

‘Welcome to the rape camp’: Sexual exploitation and the internet in cambodia

Abstract

Summary: This article reports a piece of original research into the links between the trafficking in women and children across the globe and how such trafficking practices have been facilitated by developments in technology and telecommunications. The connections between prostitution in the Mekong Sub-Region, pornography on the Internet, and sex tourism have also been researched, based on the experiences of women and children and the men who exploit them.