EU Citizenship and Political Identity: The Demos and Telos Problems

Citizenship is the cornerstone of a democratic polity. It has three dimensions: legal, civic and affiliative. Citizens constitute the polity's demos, which often coincides with a nation. European Union (EU) citizenship was introduced to enhance ‘European identity’ (Europeans’ sense of belonging to their political community). Yet such citizenship faces at least two problems. First: Is there a European demos? If so, what is the status of peoples (nations, demoi) in the Member States? The original European project aimed at ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.’ Second: Citizens are members of a political community; to what kind of polity do EU citizens belong? Does the EU substitute Member States, assume them or coexist alongside them? After an analytical exposition of the demos and telos problems, I will argue for a normative self‐understanding of the EU polity and citizenship, neither in national nor in federal but in analogical terms.     

The Chameleon Nature of Populist Parties. How Recurring Populism is Luring ‘the People’ of Serbia and Croatia

Abstract

In recent years the phenomenon of populism has inspired many debates and many doubts. Despite the growing scholarly interest, it still means different things to different researchers. In the first part of the article the author briefly presents the issues related to the phenomenon of populism itself and its relationship with democracy, and examines the creation of parties that researchers label populist. The second part is a case study that analyses the sources of populism, its manifestations and its importance in Serbia and Croatia over the last century.     

Negotiating Gender

This paper analyses the parliamentary debates over two key pieces of legislation on family law approved in Chile between 1994 and 2004. The aim is to identify the discursive representations on gender and family predominant in these debates. These representations and the way in which they were negotiated in Congress, it will be argued, were a key factor in determining the approval and final text of each of the bills examined. When women's demands for greater autonomy were in tension with prevalent ideas on the traditional, hetero-normative family, such tension was resolved in favour of the latter as the discursive category that allowed negotiations to progress. As a result, although the new legislation brought about positive change, it did retain the ideal of the traditional, sanctioned-by-marriage family at its basis, and as the one the State should protect. Methodologically, this paper is based on the qualitative analysis of 4000 pages of parliamentary debate and in-depth interviews with legislators and government officials directly involved in the debate on each of the laws examined here.     

Fighting for Fame: The ‘Heroines of Pervyse’ and the Disputed Construction of a Public Image

Abstract: This investigative analysis bases itself on an array of documentary material from the archives of the Imperial War Museum in its effort to recover the intricate story behind the two British volunteer nurses who made their name during the First World War with the first-aid station they set up in Pervyse, a mere stone's throw away from the Belgian firing line. The essay juxtaposes a variety of documentary sources—the unpublished diaries of the two women, Geraldine Mitton's reconstruction of the story out of the nurses' journals and letters in The Cellar-House of Pervyse (1916), and two photograph albums, ‘The Women of Pervyse’, bequeathed to the Imperial War Museum—in a quest to understand how the two nurses came to acquire their status of national heroines. Sifting through the source material, this investigation reveals the numerous inconsistencies and gaps that exist between the published and the unpublished accounts of the dressing station, whose true genesis is obscured by several competing narratives. A close reading of Mitton's account and the photographic portraitures discloses that neither of these documents ought to be taken at their face value. They need to be understood as valuable tools in the nurses' own battle for authority, public recognition and their opportunity to feature as genuine protagonists in the arena of war.     

The weight of history: child protection and parenting with a disability in 20th Century Iceland

ABSTRACT

This contribution focuses on four periods in Iceland, from the early twentieth century until the time of writing, in order to document and analyse the struggles of people with intellectual disabilities to marry, have a family and maintain custody of their children. Each period is linked to specific pieces of legislation that governed the bodies and lives of disabled people and reflected larger social norms concerning issues of family life and parenthood. An emphasis is placed upon the perspective of contemporary critical disability studies in analysing the historical development of this struggle, and the voices of those who experienced this struggle first-hand, drawn from a number of research projects conducted in Iceland. Our main contention is that the weight of history still comes to bear upon matters of parenting and family life, even in the most recent shift toward a human rights approach to disability. There remains a strong socio-cultural resistance toward parenting with an intellectual disability, rooted in the ideology of early twentieth-century eugenics. Our goal is to document the development of these phases throughout the twentieth century in Iceland in order to illustrate how older ideas and prejudices still inform contemporary child protection practices concerning parents with disabilities.