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In this conceptual paper, I discuss the lifestyle approach as a possible sociological contribution to the interdisciplinary discourse on climate change mitigation. The lifestyle approach could integrate sometimes contradicting results from micro-economics, social-psychology, cultural anthropology, as well as from social geography, and relate them to resource consumption. Even if the word “lifestyle” is very popular within environmental discourse, it has rarely been used in a sociological sense. Lifestyles are bundles of meaningful routines (not only consumption) embedded in everyday practices that have a cultural-symbolic as well as a material dimension. To assess the potential of behavioral change, it seems not to be sufficient to study the effects of values and attitudes on environmental behavior as separated from other social activities. Con-flicting goals and individual priorities have to be taken into account as well. Lifestyle changes are dependant on individual opportunities to choose between different options. People need financial, cultural, or social resources to realize their values in everyday life. I suggest an integrative life-style model, which reflects these levels. In the second part of the paper, I sketch its potential value in the case of car use. The system of automobility affects the chances of many people to create a meaningful life. It allows new lifestyles but it also limits the feasibility of other lifestyles at the same time. Environmental policy could support the creation of new, more sustainable life-styles by reducing the lock-in effect of automobility and reopening this socio-technological sys-tem. In this paper, lifestyles are treated as an interpretative scheme, but I also like to encourage further operationalization efforts.

This paper locates the collapse of East German communism in Marxist-Leninist monetary theory. By exploring the economic and cultural functions of money in East Germany, it argues that the communist party failed to reconcile its ideological aspirations ­ a society free of the social alienation represented by money and merchandise ­ with the practical exigencies of governing an industrial society by force. Using representative examples of market failure in production and consumption, the paper shows how the party’s deep-seated hostility to money led to economic inefficiency and waste. Under Honecker, the party sought to improve living standards by trading political liberalization for West German money. Over time, however, this policy devalued the meaning of socialism by undermining the actual currency, facilitating the communist collapse and overdetermining the pace and mode of German unification.

This paper considers works of romance fiction produced between 1933 and 1943 by two prolific writers, both with Nationalist sympathies, whose works sold widely (and can still be purchased today), attracting numerous film adaptations. It explores the ways in which their romances illustrate a conservative modernity, through their choice of upwardly mobile, active female protagonists and through their plots driven by change and speed. The paper also examines the self-reflexive dimensions of these romances, arguing that we should not assume that self-reflexivity is the prerogative of high culture. Particular stress is based on the repeated plotlines based on fraudulent marriages which blossom into ‘true love’. The paper concludes that, although these novels in no way reflect the reality of their time, at a structural level their stress on spatial dislocation, chance, and impersonation speaks to the popular imaginary in two periods – the Second Republic and the early Franco regime – characterized by personal and political upheaval.

This paper provides a preliminary examination of some of the late eighteenth-century bases for the reception of liberalism and debates on slavery, specifically the Luso-Brazilian engagement with natural science and the work of the Lisbon Royal Academy of Sciences. The Academy’s work most directly concerned with the question of slavery and the slave trade appealed to economic principles of utility, efficiency and productivity to identify ways to reform the practice of enslaving Africans in the interest of increasing the wealth generated within the colonial and imperial economies. Thus, even as slavery was being assailed internationally on both philosophical and religious grounds, Luso-Brazilian Academic writing insisted it was an economic rather than moral problem. At the same time, however, Academic inquiries into the question of human difference often undercut claims about Africans that were invoked elsewhere in the Atlantic world to justify the perpetuation of slavery and the slave trade. As Academic reformism thus grappled with the humanity of Africans, civilization and barbarism emerged as privileged categories of analysis for discerning the future of slavery, reasserting the moral dimensions of the institution.The paper was presented at the conference on The End of the Old Regime in the Iberian World sponsored by the Spanish Studies Program and the Portuguese Studies Program of UC Berkeley on February 8-9, 2008.

This paper revisits the afrancesados’ role in Spanish historiography as well as their political positioning prior to, during and after the French invasion of 1808. Taking the famous playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín as a case study, the paper explores his political ideas beyond established labels such as “supporter of enlightened despotism” coined by Sánchez Agesta. To this end the article reviews a variety of Moratín’s texts, including Carta de un vecino de Foncarral a un abogado de Madrid sobre el libre comercio de los huevos, Apuntaciones sueltas de Inglaterra, Viaje a Italia, a Prologue to Isla’s Fray Gerundio de Campazas, as well as Moratín’s correspondence. The essay argues that despite his confessed social, economic and even political liberalism, Moratín never supported any specific form of political organization, neither absolutist nor liberal. His open skepticism locates him beyond prevailing ideologies.The paper was presented at the conference on The End of the Old Regime in the Iberian World sponsored by the Spanish Studies Program and the Portuguese Studies Program of UC Berkeley on February 8-9, 2008.

Shared fundamental liberties and democratic principles have long provided the core of what observers of international affairs termed the West. While national institutions and policies have at times varied, they rarely challenged the foundations of the transatlantic partnership. With the rise of information technology and the new security environment, however, local variations in fundamental rights have produced significant international implications. Examining recent transatlantic disputes over privacy and free speech, the paper argues that a new set of international issues have emerged dealing with transnational civil liberties. Once core unifying principles of the transatlantic relationship these basic freedoms have transformed into flashpoints for conflict. After identifying this new trend, the paper argues that the nature of these conflicts is framed by the timing of international interdependence relative to the maturity of national regulatory regimes.

Over the past decade much has been published on the contribution of information and communication technology (ICT) to economic growth. In an attempt to find parallel historical evidence, several scholars have attempted to review the contribution of other general purpose technologies (notably steam and electricity) to output and productivity growth. Most of these contributions have had a national focus on the United States and for a limited number of European countries (for example, Finland, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom). In this paper we review the evidence from these individual studies from an international comparative perspective. This should help us to better understand how general purpose technologies (steam, electricity and ICT) have contributed to differentials in productivity growth between European countries and the United States. In addition to the evidence from the macroeconomic perspective we also focus on the diffusion of technologies by industry, for which we exploit information on technology adoption and productivity growth by industry and their contributions to the aggregate. We conclude that in terms of the speed of diffusion, the ICT era is comparable to the electricity age, i.e., a relatively rapid diffusion across the economy. But the impact of ICT on productivity growth is, at least for the time being, less pervasive than for electricity. The diffusion is strongest in market services, but European countries generally seem to have fallen behind the U.S.. The paper speculates that non-technological factors may have interacted more intensively with technology use during the ICT era than during the electricity and steam ages.

This paper examines the origins of nationalism in nineteenth century Philippines through cultural translation practices. Its central thesis is that Filippino nationalism did not originate with the discovery of an indigenous identity by the colonized and his/her subsequent assertion of an essential difference from the colonizer. Rather, its genesis lay in the transmission of messages across social and linguistic borders among diverse people whose identities and identifications were far from settled. The paper traces this process along three fronts: Spanish conversion practices, vernacular plays, and Phillipine nationalist activism.Due to a shortage of missionaries in the archipelago, Spanish clergy chose to learn the numerous languages of the colonized rather than preaching in their own, and in so doing, made translation into an evangelical instrument. This practice rendered native languages ‘foreign’ in some respects to their local users, and turned conversion into a way of identifying with the uncanny presence of alien messages from alien speakers, from within one’s own speech. Because missionary translation localized Christian discourse while at the same time retaining certain Castilian and Latin words deemed sacred in their original forms, translation also instituted a linguistic hierarchy that made local languages appear to be naturally subordinate to Castilian and Latin.Castilian words, most of which were unfamiliar to mass audiences, were also used in the domain of vernacular theater or Comedyas. Rafael argues that it was precisely a widespread mass belief in the link between Castillian’s untranslated foreignness and its perceived telecommunicative properties, which accounted for the popularity of vernacular plays. He thus understands Comedyas as performative modes which mobilized Castilian’s potential for communicating in and through different local languages, across geographic and social distances, and through the boundaries of class. Preceded by the drama of Christian conversion, Comedyas were also products of translation themselves, providing venues for domesticating alien places and alien sources of power lying at the basis of colonial-Christian authority. But, unlike Catholic prayers that were directed to God, vernacular plays relied on the recognition of an audience which was yet to consolidate its position as such. The comedya anticipated nationalist attempts to invest a second language with the capacity to recast vernacular languages and local identities into something other that could then be commonly shared.In forming a Filipino nationalist identity, appealing for the expansion of limits to citizenship and political representation under colonial rule, Ilustrado nationalists also sought to become agents of translation – using Castilian, a language deployed by those in authority. Thus, this paper argues that Filipino nationalism was a practice of translation, understood first as the coming into contact with the foreign and subsequently reformulating it into an element of oneself. This process entailed at least in its formative moments, discovering an alien aspect residing within colonial society and translating it into a basis for a future history.

Nicolaïdis and Nicolaïdis ask in this concluding paper: Why has a project with such auspicious beginnings, such worthy intentions failed to develop peace-making practices, increasingly exhibited inconsistencies and dilemmas, and proven unable to provide a framework for the negotiation of a security partnership? Authors of the other papers in this series give numerous clues to the contradictions that have characterized the Barcelona Process since its inception and the current challenges facing it. Above all, instead of seeing structural realities – the economic, political, social, cultural gap between Europe and the Arab world – progressively addressed through EMP institutions, geopolitical realities and developments have intruded to heighten these gaps and asymmetries. Moreover, Europe’s self-perception as a regional power increasingly colludes with its effort to protect itself against the fundamentalist threat under the growing political sway of right wing politics. The Arab regimes’ continued objective to avoid social-political destabilisation through external legitimacy while minimizing structural reform has generally been abated; and the necessity for all actors to take into account the growing presence of the US, its actions, initiatives and representations in the post 9/11 era, have further marginalized the EMP.