Search results

This article employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molina – the superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944 – to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly 'common-sense' understandings of 'Italian-ness' (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular, the author focuses on the state's treatment of the region's Italian speakers (trentini) in its attempts to 'Italianise' their German-speaking neighbours and solidify fascist control of Italy's northern border. Ultimately, Molina's recollections recount how Rome's struggles to articulate and implement clear and consistent criteria for Italianisation led to the weakening of regional officials' moral authority, political support and 'totalitarian' façade. The simultaneously vague and critical project of Italianisation did not simply illuminate fascism's inability to inculcate an 'Italian identity' among Tyroleans, however; it also served to highlight fundamental difficulties in defining national identities in any nation-state.

This article focuses on two practices which, while neglected by historiography, played a fundamental role in the re-emergence of the fascist community after 1945, namely travel and reading. Travel allowed fascists to realise that the political cause they were fighting for had remained alive even outside their own borders, and to strengthen and renew their transnational network, while reading books – often banned books – allowed them to reinforce their ideology and score a victory over the authorities. By leaving aside a reconstruction focused purely on political events, this article sheds light on how fascists were materially able to re-think their political identity and to influence, albeit to different degrees, the transformed political context of the immediate post-war period.

One of the ways in which Wilsonianism permeated Europe during the Great War was through the activities of the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Historians are still discussing the effectiveness of the CPI's propaganda abroad. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on and problematising the case of Italy. The Italian scenario confronted the CPI with a series of challenges that exposed the limits of America's germinal public diplomacy. The author's argument is that, in spite of its numerous attempts, the CPI's activities in Italy resulted in a substantial failure, which was mostly due to an inter-institutional conflict of interests and competences between the CPI and the US embassy in Rome. Such a short-circuit prevented US propagandists from developing a genuine understanding of the Italian public's preferences and resulted in what people in the Peninsula perceived as a general lack of empathy.

The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called 'Eurocommunist' turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered 'interweaving'. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the 'women's question' – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists' reception of 1970s feminism.

This research examines the central banks of interwar Europe through the lens of statistics. It focuses particularly on how the rise of economic and statistical expertise simultaneously supported the existing goals of central banks to retain national autonomy and the tenets of liberal internationalism espoused by the League of Nations. The institutionalised efforts to improve quantitative research culminated in the 1928 Conference of Central Bank Statisticians, where delegates envisioned creating new channels of cooperation based on standardised terminology and a centralised information bureau. By framing central banks within the historiographies of statistics and interwar internationalism, this article details the confluence of factors that shaped a new dependence on expertise.

On 1 March 2022, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the Russian President Vladimir Putin's government of waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. Speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), she drew explicit links to the Nazi war of aggression in order to legitimise sanctions against Russia as she stressed the UN's mission to work for peace enshrined in the UN charter. Twelve months earlier, in February 2021, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz sentenced a forty-four-year-old Syrian citizen to four and a half years' imprisonment. Based on the 'shared values of humanity', the verdict made headlines as the court explicitly cited the universal jurisdiction principle enshrined in the Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (VStGB) that had been enacted in 2002 to bring German law into accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.1 Since 2002, German courts have adopted these international law principles and legal norms in a series of legal actions against foreigners to prosecute crimes against humanity.

Windturbinenschaufelmontage [Wind Turbine Blade Assembly]

Perfumesco.pl; with case note by Agnieszka Sztoldman

ZARA

AbstractThe politicisation of the future is gaining attention, especially in research on the impact of emerging technologies on modern societies. This observation has motivated technology assessment (TA) and related research in science and technology studies (STS) to involve transformative practices in their examination of existing socio-technical futures in order to adapt them to societal needs. To this end, participation processes are initiated that aim to bring together different stakeholders, from research and development and beyond, to debate existing visions of the future and to confront the different stakeholders with their own ideas and the consequences thereof. Currently, however, especially in the context of responsible research and innovation (RRI), voices are also calling for reflection on the process of participation itself. We reflect on the process of framing discussions in society based on technical visions of the future from a cultural studies perspective.Building on cultural semiotic analysis and our definition of visions of the future as cultural techniques, this paper discusses the consequences of the orientation along the future in transformative research. Cultural semiotics provides a kind of meta-reflection on the role of research in TA and STS on the politicisation of the future. We fall back on the definition of visions of the future as cultural techniques to show that visions of the future not only originate in modern culture, but also contribute to its further development.Using the example of the transformative vision assessment project on 3D printing futures conducted within the research cluster "3D Matter Made to Order (3DMM2O)", and based on the cultural semiotic approach, we reflect on the prerequisites and limitations of the politicisation of the future and the intervention of transformative vision assessment in politicisation processes. The limitation stems from the fact that vision assessment, and more generally TA, is oriented in its intervention towards visions of the future and thus itself contributes to the further politicisation of the future. To elaborate the preconditions of the dynamic and culture-changing effects of visions of the future, we turn to the concept of cultural mechanism to grasp different steps of the politicisation processes in which vision assessment practices are involved. The role of vision assessment in the politicisation process is unavoidable; however, it can be mitigated by meta-reflection on its own orientation to the future.

Abstract
In August 2021, the 'Second Act for the Modernization of Patent Law' (Zweites Patentrechtsmoderni-sierungsgesetz) introduced an explicit proportionality defense into Sec. 139(1) German Patent Act. Unlike the competition law or national contract law prong of the Huawei defense in FRAND cases, the proportionality defense thus derives from the GPA itself. The new provision has already generated much debate and some initial case law. According to public knowledge, however, it has not yet been raised in a German FRAND case, although it seems inevitable that this will happen. Hence, this article offers to market participants and the judiciary a proposed analytical framework for considering such a proportionality defense in German FRAND cases. For this purpose, it undertakes a comparative assessment of U.S. patent injunction law. As to German law, the focus is on whether the proportionality defense and the FRAND license defense can be raised in parallel, whether FRAND royalties are a suitable basis for calculating an appropriate financial compensation under Sec. 139(1)(4) and how a court should assess whether the impact of an injunction in a FRAND case triggers the proportionality defense.

Abstract
This article discusses the implementation of the press publishers' right introduced by Art. 15 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM). It analyses Member States' transpositions through the lens of the legislative intent of the EU legislator, who aimed to strengthen the press publishers' bargaining position towards digital intermediates while preserving users' freedom to share information online. The article argues that the implementation process further exposes the shortcomings of the press publishers' right and its unfitness to deliver the goals set. The negotiation basis that the right provides is neither clear, nor capable of correcting bargaining imbalances, as it is unable to force relevant platforms to the negotiation table. The extension of the scope of the press publishers' right to social media is questionable, as it inherently influences users' freedoms. The article cautions against the implementation of the press publishers' right in a way that mimics the solutions endorsed in the competition law-based bargaining codes with the excess of implementation freedoms provided by the CDSM Directive.