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"Carlo Bastasin and Gianni Toniolo provide a much-needed, up-to-date economic history of Italy from unification in 1861 to the present. They reveal the factors behind Italy's twentieth-century growth as well as how economic decline in the last thirty years has resulted in rising levels of populism, mistrust and government instability."

The heightened resonance of identity-driven politics in many states across twenty first century Europe emphasizes the critical role of history in shaping public contestation of the idea of the nation, and accordant manifestations of nationalism and national identity. How the past is interpreted or what and how is remembered has proven increasingly febrile, contentious, and divisive. Debates about history have gone beyond academia, and have permeated and polarised politics and society in many European countries. Intense debate and dispute about national history and culture has often focused on the history teaching in schools, colleges, and universities. According to the aforementioned, it is evident that the teaching of history in the classroom is a relevant topic within the educational system. For this reason, it is not surprising that many times the choice of what kind of history to teach becomes a controversial topic. The existence in a given society of different visions about the nation or the various responses proposed to face the social challenges existing in it (immigration, independence nationalisms...) can turn the teaching of history into a debated and controversial topic. Logically, depending on the specific political context of each country, this debate can acquire different developments and characteristics. The school is not an institution isolated from its socio-political context. In fact, both areas constantly interact. Therefore, this book proposes an approach to this topic that tries to connect the specific political context of different countries with the debates about education and history teaching from 1990 until the present. It deals with the extent to which the social and political context affects the history teaching practice developed in the classrooms through the decisions made on the official curricula and textbooks. Emphasizing this connection between both aspects is one of the strengths of this book. That is the reason why this book proposes an approach to that reality from diverse points of view and show the different materializations observed in this area in the studied cases. The chapters of this volume allow us to verify this heterogeneous reality and help enrich our knowledge on this broad and interesting topic.

Carlo Bastasin and Gianni Toniolo provide a much-needed, up-to-date economic history of Italy from unification in 1861 to the present day. They show how, thirty years after unification, Italy began a long phase of convergence with more advanced economies so that by the late twentieth century Italy's per capita income reached the levels of Germany, France and the UK. From the mid-1990s, however, the Italian economy declined first in relative and then absolute terms. The authors describe the intertwined financial and institutional crises that eroded trust in the political system and in the economy at the exact juncture when new technologies and markets transformed the global economy. Longstanding problems of uneven levels of education and obsolete bureaucratic and judicial practices deepened the division between economically vibrant regions and the rest, causing polarization, political instability and rising public debt. Italy's contemporary malaise makes the country a test-case for understanding the implications of protracted declines in productivity and the flattening of GDP growth for the stability of western democracies, resulting in populism, mistrust and political instability.

Robert Misik zeichnet ein Regime und das Charakterbild eines rücksichtslosen Despoten, der Europa die Friedensordnung raubt, an die wir uns gewöhnt hatten. Wladimir Putin hat alle an der Nase herumgeführt. In den neunziger Jahren galt er als Demokrat und bewunderte Augusto Pinochet. Nachdem er sich ins Präsidentenamt trickste, beginnt er mit einer Seilschaft hartgesottener KGB-Leute, Russland zur autokratischen Despotie umzuwandeln. Und genauso schnell bastelt er sich eine Staatsphilosophie. Deren Elemente: autokratischer Führerkult, Patriotismus, Imperium, orthodoxe Spiritualität IBM und Gekränktheit. Dabei stützt er sich auch auf faschistische Denker, etwa auf Ivan Iljin, der Hitler und Mussolini bewunderte. Und er spinnt Netzwerke im Westen, um die Demokratien zu spalten. Putin stilisiert sich zum harten Kerl, zum starken Mann, mit vulgärer Sprache und einer Rhetorik der Gewalt. Nach dieser Lektüre bleibt nur die Frage: Wie konnten wir so blind sein? (Verlagswerbung)

In this Top Twenty Commentaries section of the Centennial Issues of the journal, Zeev Maoz reviews the highly cited article coauthored with Bruce Russett Normative & Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946 - 1986(1993). The two tasks of the article are delineated as an examination of "democratic peace" as a spurious relationship that could be disconfirmed, & to provide a stepping stone for converting the democratic peace into a research program. Systematic analysis of the Polity regime data, scales for violent disputes, & a long time period did not support the notion that democracies are more peaceful in general. The idea that theoretical innovation of normative & institutional explanations should be treated as alternative hypotheses is argued to have established a more sophisticated analysis. The problems of outlining the underlying assumptions, & differentiating the normative from the structural explanations are explained. Subsequent work generated by the article & the arenas impacted by the work are delineated. References. J. Harwell

La filière canne à sucre Sud-africaine intègre depuis de nombreuses années les petits planteurs noirs. Dans le nouveau contexte politique actuel, la viabilité de ces exploitations représente un objectif stratégique fort, mais contraint par la libéralisation récente du prix du sucre. Un projet de recherche portant sur l'amélioration de la productivité de ces planteurs a été mis en place dans le cadre d'une collaboration entre le Cirad, l'Institute of Natural Resources et l'industrie sucrière. Ce projet s'est tout d'abord focalisé sur l'organisation de la récolte et plus particulièrement sur les modalités de gestion des entreprises de travaux agricoles (ETA) qui assurent pour le compte des planteurs, les opérations de coupe, chargement et transport de la canne. Suite à une enquête compréhensive sur un échantillon réduit, une première analyse du contexte a permis de faire évoluer la problématique vers l'étude des relations entre planteurs individuels, ETA et sub-committee, ces derniers correspondant à une zone géographique bien délimitée, dont les cannes sont regroupées en un point pour être pesées et transportées vers l'usine. Ces sub-committee jouent un rôle central dans la régulation de l'approvisionnement de l'usine. Cette missioon a permmis de réaliser quelques enquêtes de terrain, de concevoir une grille d'analyse et un outil de simulation budgétaire, ainsi qu'à revoir le protocole et le questionnaire utilisé

Marginal notes. ; Half title. ; Electronic reproduction. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; 44