Die Entwicklung des Föderalismus und der Föderalismus ‐ diskussion in der Schweiz von 1874 bis 1964

Before 1874 and after 1964, the evolution of federalism and related political discourses is well known. Between these years, however, stretches a terra incognita, which this political‐historical essay tries to explore. This period was characterised by a steady shift of power from the Canton's to the Confederation, resulting in the frequent re‐grouping of federalists and centralists. Before the First World War, traditionalists from central and occidental Switzerland fiercely defended a confederalist vision. During the interwar years, things quietened down. The modern federal State organisation was no longer fundamentally questioned, and the debate focused on technical questions. The “geistige Landesverteidigung” (moral defence of the country against fascism) secured an enduring yet problematic place for federalism in Swiss culture by transforming it into the “unity in diversity” principle. After the Second World War, modernising forces resulted in the “executive and co‐operative federalism” that we know today.     

Rome and its Histories: a View from Australia

In this paper I trace the many debates about the past, and its relationship with the present and the future, that have eddied around Rome over the last two centuries. I spend quite a bit of time illustrating the Catholic line on the “eternal city” and on its contestation from, first, Italian nationalist and then more imperialist and Fascist expositions of “sites of memory” there. After “liberation” in 1944, there were new approaches to elucidating the city's meaning, headed by the “myth of Anti‐Fascism” and extending to a left terrorist reading by the Red Brigades. In recent years, “post‐fascism” has grown in importance in Italy's capital, especially as embodied by the mayor since 2008, Gianni Alemanno. These ideological and politically inspired reckonings of history have squared uneasily with the more popular comprehension of the place of the past, all the more given that Rome has been in rapid growth, first from within Italy and nowadays from across the globe. Specific urban groups, notably the city's Jews, have also read history in their own manner. In sum, Rome has not been a venue for a simple, two sided, “culture war”, as cliché assures us is our fate in Australia. Rather, as is also true here, Rome has proved a site of constant and multi‐fronted arguments about the meaning of history, as should be true of any serious democracy.     

Berkeley

Abstract

CCAS now has a membership of about 65 here at Berkeley. We struggle on meeting in between National Guard search and destroy operations. Franz Schurmann and David Marr went to Stockholm to talk to the NLF and the DRV people. A press conference for them was just beginning when the helicopter swept over Sproul Plaza spraying CN gas. Several nights later they held forth at a large CCAS gathering to discuss their trip and what we as “Asian Scholars” might do about a war which obviously has not ended.     

Trains,Plains and Automobiles: New South Wales Political Debates (1985) and the Invention of Western Sydney

There has recently been conjecture as to the decline of the major political traditions and the rise of a more fragmented politics in Australian cities. This paper uses a “slice history” approach to explore the evolving concept of “the West” in Sydney, New South Wales, its place in public debate, and the interplay between centre and periphery during the single “axial” year of 1985. New South Wales Legislative Assembly debates are tabulated, analysed and discussed in the context of larger government programs and public debates. The paper concludes that the concept of “The West”, while of vital political importance in both state and Federal politics, is an elusive term which has been used in unreflective, and often self‐defeating, ways by those tasked with providing the region with services.     

Categorical Threat and Protest Policing: Patterns of Repression Before and After Democratic Transition in South Korea

This article challenges the view that protest policing depends on situational threats, such as violent, disruptive tactics and the size of protests, by analysing how categorical threats assigned to movement groups' social-demographic identities affect repression. An analysis of South Korea's democratic transition reveals that categorical threats importantly trigger differential repression after the transition. Compared to moderate “citizens' movements” that thrived during Korea's democratisation, the protests organised by “people's movements” incurred state repression after controlling for other alternative variables. The result is also supported by qualitative evidence from multiple in-depth interviews with activists. The implication of differential repression is discussed in terms of how a democratising state attempts to channel and regulate social movements.     

Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate with contemporary discussions of “post-democratisation,” a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as “politics by public security.” This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and has involved both illegal interventions by state institutions – such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service – and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation by obfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right.     

“A Good‐Will Ship”: The Light Cruiser Köln Visits Rabaul (1933)

The concept of loyalty still holds a central space in many histories about New Guinean‐Australian relations, especially during the Second World War, and translates into demands by Australians that New Guineans recognize Australia's political system as “the best”. In this article about the visit of the first German navy cruiser to New Guinea after the First World War, I tell a story not about loyalties, but about contesting colonial claims, namely Australia's insistence on “loyalty”, and Germany's demand for a “return” of her colony. The visit of Köln in 1933 raises questions such as: How did Germans and Australians negotiate living together in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea? How were divisions, grief, tensions, and hostilities after the First World War dealt with? What separated them, what united them, and what role did New Guineans play in this complex relationship?     

Die Wiederherstellung des Marktsubjekts

The UK is generally considered a laboratory for styles of governance influenced by New Public Management: outsourcing, internal markets, targets, auditing. The shifts in governance style, and the new instruments that have accompanied them, were once synonymous with “Thatcherism” but have since been adopted and refined by New Labour. Early critical social scientific analyses deployed the Gramscian notion of hegemony to analyse this shift. This was followed by Foucault inspired analyses of “governmentality”. The latter focused more explicitly on the micro-level of conduct. This article follows that lead, but seeks to address the central puzzles thrown up by this experiment through Max Weber’s conception of a “bureaucratic revolution” and Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the constitution of a “market subject” via a “double movement”: a simultaneous loosening and tightening of control. The Weber-Polanyi approach allows us, we argue, to make the link more explicit between micro-level changes in the “conduct of life” (Lebensführung) and the meso-level instruments designed to bring about such a re-orientation of conduct. The article makes the case with reference to empirical material from a number of public services, notably education and health. Overall, the decisive factor is not a weakening of the state, but a change in its capacities and instruments.     

Transnationale Migration jenseits von Assimilation und Akkulturation

Classic theories of migration describe international migration as one-way movements and investigate the cultural adjustment of migrants into a “majority society”. Contrary to this view, the article raises the question of new conceptual possibilities to describe migrants’ assimilation and acculturation without conceptually focusing on a nation-state frame. In doing so, it makes reference to theories of transnational migration which define migration as a circular process connecting both sending and receiving contexts. This perspective enables, first, to analyze “structural assimilation” as multiple simultaneous inclusions of individuals into societal institutions in different nation-state locations. Secondly, it suggests to consider acculturation as a cultural adjustment of migrants’ knowledge patterns, which goes hand in hand with the maintenance of cultural “otherness”.     

Policing protest in the Australian Capital Territory: the introduction and use of the Public Order Act 1971

This article examines the reaction by the Australian Federal Government to the protest movements of the 1960s–1970s and their attempts to use public order legislation to thwart radical discontent in Australia. It argues that the Public Order (Protection of Persons and Property) Act 1971 was aimed at the threat of “violent” protests, particularly the tactic of the “sit-in”, and that to this end, the legislation was an overreaction to the actual threat posed by the protest movements at the time. It also shows that after a long gestation period, the Act was ill-equipped to deal with the changing nature of demonstrations in the 1970s, such as the problems caused by the erection of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Thus, after an initial flurry of use in mid-1971, the law has been seldom used since.     

Populism,privilege, and democracy in Henry James’s The Bostonians: encounters with community

ABSTRACT

Unusually for Henry James, The Bostonians (1886) addresses notions of “the people,” popular movements, and socio-political reform. Foregrounding the position of women, the narrative searchingly, if ambiguously, appraises conditions in the United States of the 1870s, following the Civil War. As Olive Chancellor (a Boston feminist) and Basil Ransom (a conservative Southerner) vie for possession of the malleable orator Verena Tarrant, the text explores the failure of “union” in both its personal and political senses. The populist-feminist rally concluding the narrative highlights the prevailing challenges to democratic possibilities. Community in its traditionally cohesive guise has metamorphosed into the “inoperative community” theorized by Jean-Luc Nancy. Mutually dependent, monadic “singularities” converge in tense encounter. “Community,” according to Roberto Esposito, inevitably separates such vulnerable “singularities” from themselves and others through the play of social relationality. The novel’s democratic orientation is nonetheless sustained by its capacious form and the hospitable engagement of its readers.     

“De-skilling” the 1891 Censuses in New South Wales and Tasmania

The 1891 censuses taken in New South Wales and Tasmania abandoned the long-established practice of grouping working-class occupations into “skilled” and “unskilled” categories. Instead, they were grouped into “Industrial” categories that did not differentiate between grades or degrees of skill. In this paper the sudden disruption to the preceding practice is explained as an effect of the intersection of two histories: the changing meaning of skill, and the history of scientific method. The paper traces the transformations in meanings of skill from an “artisanal” to an “industrial” form and examines how the two central figures in the construction of the 1891 census — the statisticians T.A Coghlan and R.M Johnston — were enmeshed in that history. Coghlan is usually given the more prominent role in accounts of late nineteenth-century statistics, but in this case Johnston's expertise in using scientific method was instrumental in the “deskilling” of the census.     

Institutional Change in Swiss Cantons: A Contribution to Describing and Explaining Institutional Reforms

Most accounts of Swiss federal institutions are unable to explain institutional change. In this contribution the authors trace change in Cantonal reforms and then use multivariate explanation models to account for institutional reforms such as New Public Management reforms. The multivariate analyses used rely on an “event count model” to explain the frequency of institutional reforms and a “binary response model” to explain why Cantons adopt New Public Management reforms. This research demonstrates that policy research as well as innovation and diffusion theories can contribute to explaining institutional reform.     

“Super” Debates within the Antipodes? Explaining Differing New Zealand and Australian Retirement Policies in the late Twentieth Century

As others have shown, for much of the twentieth century, “although to different degrees in different periods and to different degrees in the two countries”, New Zealand and Australia shared a peculiar approach to social protection internationally. In particular, Francis Castles has published widely on the Antipodean “wage earners’ welfare state”. He has also shown, however, that New Zealand and Australia took quite dissimilar paths in refurbishing each welfare state in the last two decades of the twentieth century, significantly over superannuation. Most commentators attribute the distinction to dominant political personalities. New Zealand's Robert Muldoon's “election bribe” in 1975, meant a compulsory paid‐work based superannuation system, akin to the one Australia came to develop, was replaced by a universal pension scheme. Australia's Paul Keating implemented the compulsory Australian superannuation scheme in 1992 confirming the trajectory begun in the 1970s. In this paper I put the spotlight on the 1970s corporatism and Australasian industrial cultures to explain the varying New Zealand and Australian superannuation pathways. Such an approach emphasizes multilayered historicity, agency and contingency outside leadership‐driven models. It points to variance and its limits rather than convergence, despite, and because of, common origins and welfare foundations.     

“No Colonial Baggage”: Imagining a Decolonised Australia-Africa Relations

As part of its strategy to win African votes for election to the UN Security Council (2008–12), Canberra sought to leverage its soft power potential by presenting Australia as having “no colonial baggage” in Africa while framing Australia as “a country from the Global North, located in the Global South,” and one that would “work with other small and middle powers.” Ultimately, the campaign was successful, including up to 50 of Africa's 54 countries voting for Australia. This paper considers this framing in the context of a shared but differentiated colonial history, including its contradictions, given that Australians fought several wars on African soil on behalf of the British Empire, supported white minority regimes and anti-communist movements on the continent, and maintained the white Australia policy until the 1970s. The paper deploys decoloniality theory to engage Australia's lack of a neat fit within a historicised articulation of a “coloniser-colonised” relationship between Europe and Africa. We show that, despite this lack of fit, Australia's relations with the countries of Africa reinforce long-standing of patterns of knowledge, power, and being associated with colonialism. Accordingly, the paper makes three recommendations for cooperation and innovative thinking in foreign policy and diaspora diplomacy between Africa and a more independent and multicultural Australia based on the “equality of being.”     

Relationale Soziologie – Theoretische und methodologische Positionierungen zwischen Strukturalismus und Pragmatismus

Nowadays, relational sociology is represented by sociological approaches from the US and from France. These approaches share the aim of recombining the two “mega-paradigms” in the social sciences, structuralism and pragmatism. Relational sociology is thereby conceived as a project integrating the analysis of different forms of social practices and structures. The article aims to identify the specific properties of relational sociology beyond this common basis. Starting with the “New York school of relational sociology”, it is shown that this school can on the one side be regarded as a contemporary approach of relational sociology, having introduced innovative contributions, but also shows deficient developments on the other side. Thereupon “actor-network theory” and “economics of convention” in particular are presented as examples of the “new pragmatic sociologies” in France, which can also be regarded as modern versions of relational sociology. After characterizing and comparing these three versions of relational sociology, their metatheoretical and particularly methodological commonalities are presented. Finally, the article tries to define positively what constitutes relational sociology.     

Die Bewältigung wirtschaftlicher Unsicherheit. Zum Pragmatismus der Soziologie der Konventionen

In which way exactly is the New French Pragmatic Sociology pragmatic? The specific “pragmatic anthropology” of the French Convention School is based on two theoretical concepts: The concept of the reality test and the concept of change between regimes of action. It is argued that the pragmatic quality of the reality test depends on the concept of change between regimes of action. This argument is situated in an examination of the historical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey and is then methodically demonstrated by an economic sociological case study on CO₂-trading. The concept of change between regimes of action allows the observation of peoples’ movements between the public and the private in order to resolve the inescapable uncertainty of the collective situation. In doing so, the French Convention School enhances the understanding of economic action and the paradoxical processes of order.     

Parliament on “the Wireless” in Australia

Australia's parliament allowed the radio broadcast of proceedings in 1946, a decade after New Zealand, but well before the “Mother of all Parliaments” in 1978. In keeping with Australia's reputation as a pioneering democracy, early interest in broadcasting parliamentary debates can be traced to the 1920s. In the formative years of “wireless” it was imagined radio might close the gap between parliaments and the public. Proceedings of the New South Wales parliament were actually broadcast for several weeks during 1932 (and before the New Zealand parliament institutionalised this practice). Tasmania experimented with parliamentary broadcasting in 1934. Australia's embrace of parliamentary broadcasting in 1946 was less carefully planned than has been suggested. It was an opportunistic, caucus‐initiated Chifley government measure driven by a long‐held ALP concern about newspaper bias. It was however generally justified as reform to bring the people to their Parliament and, remarkably, did have bipartisan support.     

Australia and Scotland: the Evolution of a Long‐Distance Relationship1

Scotland's impact across the world undoubtedly stretched to the Antipodes particularly, but not only, in the colonial era. Under the “canopy of Empire”, Australia and Scotland were linked by migration, trade, capital movements and by cultural ties. But these were all two‐way ties. They did not simply colour the “Australian civilisation”. Rather there was a vital and shifting reciprocation between Scotland and Australia. The relationship between them has mainly been determined by their different economic trajectories. Today financial and skilled human capital move each way between the two countries with heightened velocity and efficiency. These flows, along with continuing cultural connections, enmesh two fully developed modern economies.     

“Tongpan”: An important event in Thai cinema

Abstract

Films being made in Asian countries are now beginning to express an Asian reality. This is happening in a small way, but it is happening. The scale of the movement to break away from Hollywood and Bombay-type extravaganzas, and from films as a kind of “celluloid LSD,” is still small, constrained as it is by film-makers and sellers out to make quick profits. One little ripple that has recently emerged from the stagnant waters of Asia's film world is called “Tongpan.” The work of a group of creative amateurs, “Tongpan” is not the result of a commercial venture, and is not a professionally-made film in the conventional sense. It is also not a film in the style of what has come to be known as the “New Wave Cinema,” for “Tongpan” is not an art film to be “museumed” for wealthy connoisseurs. But precisely for all these reasons it is important that a film called “Tongpan” has been made. Indeed an important event has occurred in Thai Cinema. Important because it shows what is happening to the Thai people in the name of ‘development’ and captures for posterity the tensions and strains of an important period in Thailand's recent history.