Suchergebnisse

An 'archaeology' of memory helps to reconstruct how the layers of memory concerning the battles of Borodino in 1812 and Leipzig in 1813 have matured. Originally, this involved imperial and national places where the war against Napoleon's forces was commemorated. Attempts to make these places of memory European are proving difficult. Adapted from the source document.

Over the next few years much will be made of the hundred-year anniversary of the breakdown of the European peace into a thirty-one-year civil war that did not fully cease until 1945. In 2012 the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the fact that there has been no war within its borders for the past sixty years, and today the Union stands as a model for regional peace. But the consequences of the "Great War" and the disastrously unsuccessful "peace" of 1918 are still with us. Like Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Nobel recognized that it is essential that political decision-makers and a wider public act with an awakened sense of the everyday significance of world events.

Europe's sexual revolution has naturally evolved into a homosexual revolution. Homosexual revolutions are always a precursor to a breakup of nations, peoples and empires. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractIn September 1782, a violent and partly successful mutiny of Balinese slaves shocked the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This article will reconstruct the history of the mutiny of theMercuur, tracing its significance in the context of slavery, labour, war, and the series of "Asian mutinies" that occurred in the 1780s. The revolt of the Balinese sheds light on the development of amok as a tradition of resistance. The purpose of calling amok cannot only be explained as a direct, impulsive response to perceived injustice or violation of codes of honour. It functioned as a conscious call to arms, signalling the start of collective and organized resistance. The Balinese mutiny was both similar to and different from other European and Asian forms of revolt.

At the outset of the eurozone debt crisis more than three years ago, everyone looked to a group of AAA-rated countries to anchor the European ship and throw life preservers to the struggling peripheral countries. Their intervention was to be surgical, temporary, and reversible. That was, at least, the widely telegraphed intention. Three years later, the reality is different. There are many reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs. To start, the initial phases of the regional crisis were met with denial, bad diagnosis and inadequate responses. A weakening global economy was another complicating factor. But there was another less visible yet much more important factor at play too: the lack of political courage to call a spade a spade. There is no easy solution for the struggling European countries. Yet the longer political leaders shy away from the tough decisions, the greater the chance that there will be a lot more of them. Adapted from the source document.

The assumptions and lessons from the main theories of European integration (neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism) are depicted in order to understand their explanatory potential for the creation and evolution of Economic and Monetary Union. Since both theories come from international relations theories, their restrictions on the context of European integration are obvious. Notwithstanding both theories explain different moments of European monetary integration, they need to be supplemented by other theoretical approaches that capture the particularisms of European integration. Thus, the role of ideas, the awareness of the Europeanisation of politics, and the influence of powerful epistemic communities come to the surface. Adapted from the source document.

In 2007, the Russian government instituted quotas for immigrant work permits that were consistently lower than actual labour demand. While low quotas are politically popular on the mass level, this article argues that low quotas are also a tool of the government to distribute patronage resources to regional political and economic elites. For several years after quotas were instituted, they remained quite controversial, and during this time decisions about them were firmly in the hands of Vladimir Putin, first as president and then as prime minister, giving him a powerful tool to control the immigration process and labour market manually. While this type of manual control is effective in the short term to manage contentious policy arenas, it suffers a number of possible long-term consequences.