Suchergebnisse

An intruder at the royal table -- Everything started with a crisis -- Taste and status: the invention of the "gourmet" in early bourgeois society -- A voice in the wilderness -- The Médoc connection: transnational knowledge transfer or industrial espionage? -- Conquering the queen's palate -- Thwarted: too modern for the time -- Quantity beats quality: the challenge of the phylloxera plague -- The comeback: shape and consolidation of a brand -- New wine, new conflicts: industrial wineries, small winegrowers and the state -- The globalization trap: challenges and opportunities for Rioja wine in the 21st century.

To the outside world, for some half a century, the words Basque Country' have provoked an almost instant association with the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, Basque Homeland and Liberty) separatist group and violent conflict. The Basque Contention: Ethnicity, Politics, Violence attempts to undo this simplistic correlation and, for the first time, provide a definitive history of the wider political issues at the heart of the Basque Country. Drawing on three decades of research on Basque nationalism, Ludger Mees weaves together the various historical and contemporary strands of this contention: from the late medieval kingdoms of Spain and France and the first articulations of a Basque ethno-particularism, to the dissolution of ETA in 2018, and all manner of dictatorships, conflict, peace, civil war, political intrigue, hope and failure in-between. For anyone who has ever wanted to gain an insight into the Basque Country beyond the headlines of ETA and grasp the complexity of its relationship with Spain, France and indeed itself, this volume provides a detailed, yet digestible, basis for such an understanding.

Ludger Mees offers the first comprehensive study of one of Europe's most protracted ethnic conflicts. He carefully analyzes both the historical roots of the conflict and its later growing violent dimension. Special attention is paid to the framing of a new opportunity structure during the 1990s, which facilitated the first serious, but ultimately frustrated, attempt to broker a settlement. In the light of different theoretical and comparative approaches, the reasons for the dramatic return of terrorism and the possibilities of a more successful conflict de-escalation in the near future are discussed.

Desde los tiempos de Humboldt y Ranke, Alemania ha sido un país central para la evolución de la historiografía europea. En la segunda mitad del siglo xx, y liderada por la nueva Escuela de Bielefeld, la historiografía alemana abandonó su fijación historicista para desplegar una nueva agenda docente e investigadora centrada en el desarrollo de la sociedad contemporánea. El artículo analiza el auge de esta corriente historiográfica, pronto convertida en un nuevo paradigma, su propuesta innovadora, así como los retos epistemológicos articulados a partir de los años noventa al socaire del cultural turn.

Note on the book review published in SNM 5 (2020): Barbara Loyer on Ludger Mees, The Basque Contention. Ethnicity, Politics, Violence, Routledge, London / New York, 2020, p. 232-240.

Focusing on the Basque case study, this article adopts a historical longue-durée perspective over more than two centuries (nineteenth and twentieth) in order to better identify the dialectic in the process of identity formation and change of a small European, stateless community, separated by a borderline and living in two different political, socioeconomic and cultural settings. The political expression of this long process of Basque 'ethnogenesis' (A.D. Smith) was the rise of the nationalist movement in the Spanish Basque Country at the end of the nineteenth century. By tracing the analysis of Basque identity back to pre-modern times and following its path to the present, this article aims to produce new insights into the factors that trigger the crucial moments of identity change that bring to an end previous periods of stability. Its epistemological fundaments are connected to some prominent topics that have been widely discussed by historians and other social scientists concerned with nationalism and national identity (the cultural shape of national identities; 'modernists' versus 'ethno-symbolists'; nationalism and political religion; national identity and political violence).

José Antonio Aguirre Lekube was, and probably still is, a national hero in the Basque Country. He was appointed the first president (in Basque: lehendakari), when in October 1936 the Basque Statute of Autonomy was passed by the Spanish Parliament and the first autonomous government of Euskadi established. Being a member of the catholic Basque Nationalist Party, Aguirre became the leader of all Basque democrats in the fight against the fascist insurrection, first during the war and then in the long exile until his death in 1960. Especially after his providential escape from Nazi Germany, his leadership got a clearly transcendental and somehow divine connotation: in the painful times of exile and repression, many of his followers perceived Aguirre both as their (human) president, but also as a kind of prophet who knew the way to freedom and democracy.

The paper aims at analysing this process of transformation of a leading politician into a national hero. This analysis will be based upon the theoretical assumption that the constructivist approach alone is not able to explain the reasons of this evolution and that it has to be completed by other perspectives of explanation. In the case of Aguirre, his elevation to the status of a hero was not only the product of social engineering. Of similar, or even more importance, were other factors like historical situations of acute crises and popular distress, individual 'predestination' and even random incidents in the personal biography.

James Kennedy, Liberal nationalisms. Empire, state, and civil society in Scotland and Quebec(Montreal -­‐Kingston -­‐London -­‐Ithaca: McGill-­‐Queen's University Press, 2013) 322 pp., ISBN 9780773538986