Search

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The transatlantic religious networks promoted by Americans after World War I not only delivered human and financial resources but they also brought about significant changes in religious and political thought and practice in Europe. The experiences, networks and narratives created through two world wars equipped Europe with an ideological arsenal, which it marshalled against the Soviet threat during the cultural Cold War and which provided the European integration process with resources and legitimacy. The invocation of 'spirit' proved an extremely effective way of legitimizing the European project: it identified materialism as the seed of destruction of civilization; it promoted an interfaith narrative that was acceptable to different churches and religious sensibilities; and it represented human rights as the historical legacy of Christianity. Salvador de Madariaga's life reflects the evolution of the role of religion in the twentieth century, especially with regard to non-denominational Christianity. He was a committed missionary of ecumenist global civic conscience and a crusader for freedom of conscience against totalitarian interference. His defence of liberalism and his repeated calls for a cultural construction of Europe were rooted in his conviction of the intrinsically spiritual nature of all human beings, his identification with the legacy of Christianity and his desire to guarantee universal freedom of spirit. This article analyses documents from Madariaga's personal archive and other archives in Europe and America in order to chronicle his spiritual journey and to understand his crusade to create a 'Europe of the spirit'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama's book, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom, examines the links between religion, state action, and the development of liberalism in medieval Europe. It discusses a model of "conditional toleration"; how the interaction between religion and state influences persecution and discrimination against minorities; and how religious freedom eventually paved the way for scientific advances, liberalism, and economic growth. It tackles issues such as fiscal capacity, anti-Semitism in Europe, plagues including the Black Death, heresy in the Spanish Inquisition, witchcraft trials, the Holocaust, climate shocks, and the growth of cities with emergent religious minorities. It discusses these issues for a range of countries in medieval Europe, providing rich historical detail and interpretive depth for its main argument. This is a deeply evocative book that makes an important contribution to the new economics of religion. Carefully researched and thoughtfully crafted, the themes it discusses and the ideas it raises have relevance not only for medieval European societies, with which it is principally concerned, but also for contemporary economies everywhere. (JEL D72, N13, N33, N43, Z12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article describes how forms of mediation are segmented into mediatized forms through links among discursive and commodity-based practices. In obscuring these practices, the “mass media” construct obscures the characteristics of cultural forms that emerge and spread through these practices. The paper focuses on the processes through which the cultural form known as “the liberal subject” was re-scaled through mediatized practices in early modern Europe, a consideration of which clarifies the causes underlying its present day anxieties. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although researchers have discovered some important findings regarding the capacities and constraints of litigation, the frequency and impact of PIL, the efficacy of litigation strategies, and the process for evaluating social impact litigation, there is still a great deal that is unknown and that requires further empirical inquiry. In the present paper, I focus on the complexity of litigation procedures, the role of litigation in liberal societies, and the impact of PIL in Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the liberalisation of the European electricity sector and the creation of a single electricity market. Attempts at creating a single electricity market in Europe are now over two decades old. These efforts are pitted against the difficult task of trying to harmonise numerous electricity systems, which, for almost a century, were the product of purely national policy. The goal of creating a single market for electricity has faced many difficult hurdles. Nevertheless, the European Commission has been relentless in its efforts and continues to produce ever more detailed electricity laws to achieve its goal. The present article focuses on these problems and the newest electricity laws which aim to eliminate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to assess the debate concerning the constitutional recognition of Christianity in Europe, we need to pose the more general question of the role (if any) of the symbolic function of the modern democratic constitution in relation to religion. In the present paper, we differentiate between three stylized understandings of constitution-making, namely communitarian, liberal and discursive. Our argument is that the discursive "model" of the symbolic function of the constitution combines the merits and avoids the demerits of communitarianism and liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Madeley's (2003) comparative framework of state-church relations in Europe, Poland is part of the historic Northeast-Southeast multi-confessional culture belt. The aim of this paper is to analyse the historic relationships between the Polish state and church in relation to this framework with special attention to the post-Second World War period and to the consequences for the Polish religious landscape. In contrast to the multi-confessionality of the historic Polish polities, after the Second World War Poland became a mono-confessional, Roman-Catholic country. Territorial changes, the resettlement of people and the annihilation of the Jewish population by the Nazis were responsible for this religious homogenisation. Consequently, the relationship between state and church was almost completely confined to the relationship with the Roman-Catholic Church. During the 45 years of communist dominance, that church became the largest public organisation independent of the state authorities and played the most important role in the struggle against the ‘atheisation’ of Polish society as a consequence of the strong support for the church by the majority of people. The post-1989 period is characterised by a liberalisation towards non-Catholic religious communities and—after an initial reluctance—a positive attitude of the Polish Roman-Catholic Church (strongly supported by the Polish Pope John Paul II) towards the Polish membership of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that increasingly neoliberal forms of governmentality are evident in the educational sector of the European Commission. This is especially the case vis-à-vis the institutional philosophy of how immigrants and second-generation 'minorities' should be best integrated into European society. Both the policies and the programs associated with education and training are becoming more oriented towards the formation of mobile, flexible, and self-governing European laborers and less oriented towards an institutionalized affirmation of personal development and individual or group 'difference'. This represents a fairly substantive philosophical and practical transformation over the past five to ten years, with significant implications for conceptions of European citizenship, multiculturalism, and social belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the completion, by 1993, of a single European market and of the resulting liberalisation of internal borders, labour migration in Europe is attracting increased attention from policy-makers and social actors in the twelve member states. The present paper is an attempt to analyse and forecast the following major issues relating to migration in Europe after 1992: (i) the evolution and structure of intra-European flows in the forthcoming single European market; (ii) the integration, after 1992, of established immigrant communities, including ethnic minorities and second generation groups; (iii) future immigration from non-EC member states, in relation, inter alia, to the recent coming into play of the Eastern European periphery. The article explains that, in addition to policy-related mutations inherent in the completion of the internal market, other factors (demographic changes and insufficient enrolment of national graduate students in key disciplines) and issues (emergence of atypical groups such as second generation and Eastern European migrants), are due to generate new patterns and modified interests in European labour migration after 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European welfare state autonomy is being eroded by both European integration and 'globalization'. The attempted creation of a European 'social' area, the completion of the internal market, the competitive effects of trade liberalization and the impact on policy autonomy of greater international capital mobility all have implications for the future of welfare states. This article argues that, in combination with a domestic policy agenda making welfare provision subservient to competitiveness, globalization is operating a 'subversive liberalism' which, even in the absence of an explicit neo-liberal assault, is reshaping social welfare systems. Despite persistent differences between welfare states, there is a convergence on a less universal, dualized model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent debate on immigration to Europe has focused on how many refugees should be allowed to enter and how refugees should be distributed among EU member states, but there has been less academic focus on under what conditions, if any, human smuggling is morally permissible. How should we morally assess those who make a business out of helping migrants reach their desired destination and those who pay smugglers to reach their destination? We argue that human smuggling is morally permissible under some conditions even if it is illegal. Human trafficking, by contrast, is immoral and should be illegal. The moral conditions for permissible human smuggling are sometimes being met on the route from Africa to Europe (but are all too often grossly violated). We consider and rebut objections based on the arguments that a legal prohibition on human smuggling must translate into a moral one, and that human smuggling violates the rights of individuals to freedom of association in receiving countries. We conclude with policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do people experience legal institutions as effective sites for political and social transformation? How do people translate political and ethical goals into modalities of law? In Europe many have responded to a widespread sense of political crisis by turning to legal remedies and judicial institutions. One of these institutions, the European Court of Human Rights, provides shared frameworks for combating people's sense of impasse or decline. People experience the Court as a successful rights institution because it shapes and generates shared semiotic forms and repertoires. Through these, lawyers, judges, and rights advocates construct and recognize their actions as efficacious. Yet the experience of efficacy is an unequally shared resource. For some, legal frameworks are the condition of possibility for ethical and professional engagement. But for others, engaging with the law produces frustration and exclusion. Moreover, engaging in judicialized politics shapes some harms as legally legible and actionable, while it shapes others as tragedies beyond reach. [law, politics, liberalism, judicialization of politics, justice, human rights, efficacy, metapragmatics, Europe] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community service is today one of the most significant alternatives to imprisonment, but there is still much discussion and conflicting accounts of its origins, and little is known about the ideology that helped to introduce and spread this criminal justice innovation. Throughout the 19th century, unpaid work without deprivation of liberty was conceived and promoted as a way of paying off fines when offenders' insolvency precluded payment in money, thus avoiding imprisonment for defaulters. This article intends to highlight these liberal precedents, but also to explain the ideology and mechanisms that helped to spread this criminal justice innovation, taking into account that its diffusion has occurred in different ways, at different times and for varied reasons in each country. The implementation of community work in Europe has not been linear and progressive, but rather has been marked by historical differences that have culminated in varying degrees of success – and relative failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the paper "The Idea of Democracy in Contemporary Catholicism," by William J. Fitzgerald. It is an objective analysis of the Pope's Christmas message of 1944 and of his addresses to the Rota in 1945 and 1946. In explanation of the apparent hostility or indifference of some nineteenth- century popes toward democracy, it is correctly noted that in the past on the continent of Europe, democracy has usually meant extreme liberalism and anticlericalism. Fundamental Catholic premises are well outlined: it is recognized that there is no isolated Catholic theory of the state, but a Catholic theory of society in which the state has a definite and limited place. The Church has lived under different regimes, insisting only on the protection of fundamental human rights. From the Christmas message the main points elaborated are the emphasis on the "common man," the juridical statement of freedom of opinion and expression, the distinction between the people and the masses which is at the foundation of representative parliamentary government and the necessity of authority rooted in the natural law.

The differences between ordo- and neoliberalism are many and varied. This article suggests, however, that in directing the constitutional dynamic of European integration and postwar reconstruction, ordo- and neoliberalism represent a single movement: a conjunction of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism in opposition to democracy and especially in opposition to democratic constituent power. This dynamic becomes more evident with the Euro-crisis response, but it represents the deeper logic of postwar reconstruction. With a longer historical arc in view, authoritarian liberalism can be traced as a reaction to the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy, based on a narrow diagnosis of democratic collapse. Postwar Europe is thus reconstituted on the basis of a substitution of economic for political freedom as a legitimating device for the new constitutional imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article argues for a fresh approach to debates on democratic backsliding and European Union (EU) influence in East Central Europe (ECE), drawing on the discursive institutionalism of Vivien Schmidt. Underlying assumptions about backsliding in CEE largely reflect a set of ideas derived from the rational institutionalist and historical institutionalist schools. Moreover, the same theoretical assumptions were previously deployed to explain the apparent success of democratization and EU leverage in CEE. A discursive institutionalism perspective, stressing the role of actors and their discourses in making and unmaking institutions, suggests that democracy in CEE was always less secure than assumed. It also highlights the key role of liberal mainstream parties in embodying democratic institutions. Case studies of the liberal centre‐right in Bulgaria and social democrats in the Czech Republic highlight the way background ideas of ethnically exclusive titular states have increasingly impinged on foreground ideas of liberal pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of re‐conceptualizing a European social market economy, this contribution considers competition law's position in the European economic constitution. The economic constitution captures the economic foundation of European integration as based on the market mechanism. The contribution asks whether the change towards a 'more economic approach' to competition law implies an alienation of competition law from societal challenges. The contribution considers whether this interpretation, with competition law being such an integral part of the European economic constitution, should change in light of the constitutional goal of a European social market economy. To do so, the article sketches the fundamental place of competition law in the European economic constitution and shows how its interpretation has become more economics‐based. It highlights some of the problematic aspects of this change and analyzes these findings from the perspective of an economic constitution serving a social market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the 7th International Seminar of the Aegean on radical cultural agenda for European cities and regions in Paros Island, Greece. Relationship between economy and culture; Need for other approaches to the culture and economy question; Concern on individualism as advocated by neoliberalism.

Abstract: During the years of the financial crisis, ordoliberalism became the target of a European‐wide critical campaign. This school of thought is widely perceived as the ideational source of Germany's crisis politics, which has even led to an “ordoliberalisation of Europe”. This essay questions the validity of such assessments. It focuses on two aspects that are widely neglected in current debates. One is the importance of law in the ordoliberal vision of the ordering of economy and society. The second is its cultural and religious background, in particular in German Protestantism. The influence of the ordoliberal school on European law, so the essay argues, is overrated in all stages of the integration project. Anglo‐American neoliberalism rather than German ordoliberalism has been in the ideational driver's seat since the 1980s. In the responses to the financial crisis, the ordoliberal commitment to the rule of law gave way to discretionary emergency measures. While the foundational synthesis of economic and legal concepts became indefensible, the cultural underpinnings of the ordoliberal tradition survived and developed a life of their own, in particular in German political discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have social democratic parties responded to the recent economic crisis? For many observers, the Great Recession and the prevalence of austerity in response to it have contributed to a crisis of social democracy in Europe. This article examines the programmatic response of social democratic parties to this crisis in 11 Western European countries. It uses an original data set that records the salience that parties attribute to different issues and the positions that they adopt with regard to these issues during electoral campaigns and compares the platforms of social democratic parties before and after 2008. For this purpose, the article disentangles economic issues into three different categories and shows that this is necessary in order to understand party competition during the Great Recession: while social democratic parties shifted to the left with regard to issues relating to welfare and economic liberalism, they largely accepted the need for budgetary rigour and austerity policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, civic integration has become the dominant immigrant integration policy in Western Europe. This article reviews three debates surrounding the new policy: first, whether there is policy convergence or persistent variation along national models of integration; secondly, whether civic integration marks a retreat from multiculturalism, or is merely layered on resilient multiculturalist policies; and, thirdly, whether the new policy is liberal or illiberal, and whether it entails a return of cultural assimilation. It is argued that civic integration converges cross-nationally with respect to policy goals and instruments, while extant variation is often incoherent or touching more on the form than the substance of policy; that civic integration is national-level policy that tends to coexist with ongoing de facto multiculturalism, especially at local level; and that civic integration mostly remains in a liberal register, as it is still integration and not assimilation, which would connote forced identity change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the work of author B. Traven in novel "The Death Ship" in depicting the condition of 19th century Europe. Topics include freedom of movement started in Europe for liberating lower classes; promoting political and economic interests of nation-state over fundamental modern principles of human rights; and concept of citizenship forged in the historical transformation to wage labor.

To understand how German and Austrian readers gained access to forbidden literature during the Restoration and Vormärz periods, one must enter the world of bookshops. Publishers and book merchants, this essay argues, completed the print circuit of forbidden political knowledge. They possessed numerous ways to circumvent the censorship regimes of central Europe. Networks of publishers, printers, book dealers and their agents provided clandestine channels through which they smuggled books from abroad and circulated banned domestic literature. Because bookshop owners enabled the hand-to-hand transfer of contraband material, their role in developing an oppositional political culture was crucial. They made possible transnational communication networks by providing urban spaces where a socially diverse readership contested censorship and reshaped civic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Identity Thesis, sharing an identity tends to promote social cohesion. The article focuses on two aspects of social cohesion, namely trust and solidarity. It distinguishes between different versions of the Identity Thesis that differ regarding the causal efficacy attributed to specific values and the sharing of values, and with respect to the value sets that may be fed into the thesis (relying on work in political theory on nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism). Having established the existence of different versions of the thesis, four different accounts of why shared identities could be expected to promote social cohesion are considered and assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas are at their most powerful as an explanatory variable when they lead agents to go against any broadly reasonable interpretation of their material self-interests. They become even more intriguing when they are instrumental in actuallycausinga crisis, in which actors undercut their own stated goals and then continue to make matters worse by sticking to those same ideas, even in the light of clear evidence that the policies they inspire are not working. This contribution shows two dynamics between power and ideas to explain Germany's behavior during the euro crisis. The first dynamic examines the changing macroeconomic consensus on how to conduct monetary and fiscal policy that governed the euro from 1999 to 2012. The second dynamic shows how a strict adherence to Germany's ordoliberal ideas of budgetary rules and structural reform turned a containable Greek fiscal problem into a full-blown systemic sovereign debt crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the idea of new punitiveness with the connection of British imperialism. European penalty is the practice which is a part of their colonial strategy and has affected the humanity. The article also discusses various issues in connection like slavery, metropole, migration, liberalism and lastly how these things affected in the racist culture of the country.

This essay tentatively buttresses Alexander Somek's view that Hermann Heller's 1933 essay, ' Authoritarian Liberalism', provides a useful starting point for thinking about the ongoing European crisis, in which European authorities are favouring rigid austerity and pro-business policies while undermining basic liberal and democratic rights. Heller's unfortunate neglect, especially in Anglophone scholarship, is discussed. Nonetheless, Somek and other recent scholars who have turned to Heller to make sense of the European crisis downplay some of the tough questions raised by any attempt to apply Heller's analysis of the Weimar crisis to the contemporary setting. In particular, Heller's theory relied on a robust social democratic statism which has become increasingly unpopular even among theorists on the political left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the reforms undertaken for the sake of the Euro, the article revisits the concept authoritarian liberalism that was introduced in 1933 by the German public law scholar Hermann Heller. This notion seeks to capture the liaison between the 'strong state' and economic liberalism. The article suggests that this notion can be fruitfully used to designate the new governance of economic and monetary union. It argues, particularly, that it makes sense to speak of an authoritarian style of governance even if the latter does not wear vestiges of outright repression. Two different faces of authoritarian liberalism can be distinguished: one that looks more towards authoritarianism and another one that views authoritarian rule as a managerial strategy that is good for the economy. The article then speculates whether the EU has been, indeed, successful because it shifts between the two. Disturbingly, there may be something deeply as well as more accidentally authoritarian about European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current crisis in Europe recalls the theory and practice of authoritarian liberalism, the idea that in order to protect economic liberalism and respect for fiscal discipline, representative democracy must be curtailed. This configuration was first identified by Hermann Heller in late Weimar as a response to the imperative to maintain the ideological separation of state and economy and presented by Karl Polanyi as conditioned by broader geo-political pressure to maintain the gold standard in the inter-war period. Authoritarian liberalism is now conditioned by conflicting imperatives to maintain the project of the single currency, respect ordo-liberal concerns of moral hazard, and protect 'militant democracy' but only in one country. Does this reflect a broader geo-political disequilibrium, due to tensions between market integration, constitutionalism and democracy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the minefield of Muslim integration in Europe, paying special attention to the legal integration of Islam, which has not yet found the attention that it deserves. In a first step, the article contrasts ‘victimist’ and ‘alarmist’ views on contemporary Muslim integration, both of which are found misleading. Instead, as argued in the second part, significant progress has been made through the legal route. The conclusion provides a reflection on the role of Islam for Europe’s ‘liberal identity’ today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a sustained examination of how the vicissitudes of the Cold War shaped changing interpretations of the Spanish Civil War in Britain. Considering the perspectives of participants and historians, it focuses on the diverse strands of the Left that frequently drew on the civil war to attack each other and to make wider arguments about the global Cold War. First, with the aim of criticizing Communist take-overs in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, the article analyzes retrospective assaults on Communist party tactics and Soviet foreign policy in Spain. Second, in order to argue that the Soviet Union took a counter-revolutionary line after 1956, it investigates the re-emergence of debates over the Spanish revolution. Third, to express disapproval of the United States, it examines the increasing use of the civil war as an analogy in Cold War international affairs from the 1960s. Fourth, in support of non-Soviet Left-of-Centre collaboration, most notably Eurocommunism in the 1970s and opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s, it considers the renewed emphasis on the popular front. The trajectories of these debates reveal that, over time, the weight of the Left’s criticism moved from the Soviet Union towards the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this study was to examine how young people are intentionally or unintentionally exposed to sexual material on the internet. A sample from the EU Kids Online II project, including youth ( N = 11,712, 11-16 years, 50 % girls) from 25 countries, was used to examine predictors of unintentional exposure to online sexual material (EOSM) via pop-up images and intentional EOSM on adult/X-rated websites. Using a multilevel analysis, we considered several individual-level predictors (psychosocial characteristics, patters of internet use, and parental mediation), one country-level predictor (mean cultural liberalism of the country), and cross-level interactions. Except for gender, the study did not identify any specific patterns of individual-level predictors for unintentional and intentional EOSM: age, sensation seeking, sexual intercourse, amount of time spent online, level of digital skills, and degree of restrictive mediation predicted both types of EOSM. Intentional EOSM was more often reported by boys, while unintentional EOSM occurred to a similar degree among boys and girls. Finally, living in a country with a stronger culture of liberalism predicted a greater likelihood of intentional but not unintentional EOSM and also was associated with smaller gender differences in intentional EOSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems to be impossible for the liberal state to embrace a Christian identity, because 'liberalism' is exactly a device for separating state and religion. Discussing the implications of a recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights, Lautsi v. Italy (2011), I argue that this is not necessarily so. If paired with a liberal commitment to pluralism, a Christian identity might even be more inclusive of minority religions than a narrowly 'liberal' state identity, which has been the dominant response in Western Europe to the challenge of immigrant diversity, especially that of Muslim origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the wearing of the kirpan, a ceremonial dagger worn by Sikhs, in relation to British government policies about the wearing of clothing considered to be religiously symbolic in schools. Topics include the role of freedom of religion and religious pluralism in European societies, the nature of the liberal state, and human rights implications of the wearing of the kirpan.