Political History

Estudio de la institución del referéndum: número de consultas, cuestiones sobre las que se solicitó la opinión ciudadana, resultados del referéndum, percepción de la población y clase política de la práctica de las consultas ciudadanas. Lo anterior se estudia en el periodo que comprende la presidencia de la república francesa de Charles de Gaulle, quien hizo un amplio uso del referéndum y tras cuya última consulta hubo de dimitir.

The thesis uses local contexts to study mass democracy in the inter-war period in the medium of electioneering practice. It argues that British democracy already followed the logic of a political market in the 1920s, to a much higher degree than was the case in Germany. Whereas parties wooed voters as individuals here, they were rather seen as part of big social groupings in German political culture, standing off against each other as opponents - and as enemies. This gave democratic contests in the Weimar Republic a war-like character, which stood in contrast to the pragmatic and playful way of dealing with conflict in Britain. The difference is explained by the traditions of how political participation had been learned throughout the 19th century in both countries, where the German path had resulted in 'politics' weighing much more heavily on social relations than was the case in Britain. The eventual failure of the Weimar Republic due to the attribution of meaning to everything political, and due to the seriousness of conflict, begs the question of whether modern democracy, to persist, requires a certain amount of disinterest among the electorate.

This article contends that scholars of the First Austrian Republic should follow the lead of Weimar historians in moving beyond the failure paradigm.  Instead of viewing the First Republic through the lens of failure, researchers should view it as a grand, open-ended experiment.  In doing so, we can ask how Austrian citizens shaped this experiment with democracy and republicanism: How did Austrians understand the relationship among nation, state, and politics in this era?  How did people conceptualize themselves as citizens in a democratic state?  How did they understand and practice democracy?  How and why did their views and practices change over time?  Who supported democracy?  How did they do so and why?  This essay uses such questions to look briefly at three issues often cited by scholars as both the symptoms and causes of failure: the desire for an Anschluss, the debate over the state’s anthem, and the inability to create a shared republican culture.  In doing so, it shows that we need to question some of the assumptions often made about the supposed weaknesses of the democratic republic.  Embracing new approaches to the study of the First Republic does not ignore the immense challenges facing it or the fact that the Austrofascist and Nazi movements ultimately prevailed.  However, by asking different questions we can develop new insights about Austrians’ experience with a democratic and republic form of government, the possibilities for democracy, and the reasons why a fascist dictatorship ultimately supplanted the First Republic.

La storia della Gran Bretagna vittoriana è un osservatorio privilegiata per la comprensione delle trasformazioni in atto nei sistemi costituzionali europei di fine Ottocento. Il saldo carattere parlamentare delle istituzioni e la peculiare realtà sociale del paese non debbono far pensare ad un caso «avulso» dal contesto europeo e dunque non utilizzabile in chiave comparata. Il volume riconsidera le vicende politiche della Gran Bretagna tra il 1885 e il 1892, alla luce di un cleavage politico trasversale alle tradizionali fedeltà ai due grandi partiti. Una frattura che per molti aspetti si richiama al dibattito politico e intellettuale presente tra le classi dirigenti liberali di molti paesi europei, allora impegnate nel riformulare le strategie della legittimazione politica di fronte alle profonde mutazioni del quadro sociale e istituzionale di fine secolo.

This article discusses photographic approaches that emerged in the Eastern Bloc and in Western Europe during the 1980s, with reference to the theories of Andreas Muller-Pohle from West Germany, Borek Sousedik from Czechoslovakia, and Jerzy Olek from Poland. In their search for emancipation from externally imposed ideologies, these photographers articulated a series of similar ideas that called upon photographers to see their medium as a means to express their inner views rather than as a mere representational instrument of ‘the real’. The article demonstrates how they contributed to promoting social and political emancipation specifically in Czechoslovakia, at a time in which the communist regime strove to strengthen and normalize its rule. The article begins with a discussion of the period of ‘normalization’ (1968–89) and how it redefined the scene of art photography in Czechoslovakia. It then analyzes the theoretical and practical work of Muller-Pohle, Sousedik and Olek, arguing that it was mainly Olek’s pedagogical program and theory of ‘Elementary Photography’ that influenced Czechoslovakian practitioners. The article explains how their innovative photographs contributed to the development of a so-called visualist style in Czechoslovakian photography, which embraced subjectivity and signalled the decline of the communist power in Czechoslovakia during the 1980s.

During the First World War, Henri Bourassa – fierce Canadian nationalist, politician, and journalist from Quebec – took centre stage in the national debates on Canada’s participation in the war, its imperial ties to Britain, and Canada’s place in the world.

In Duty to Dissent, Geoff Keelan draws upon Bourassa’s voluminous editorials in Le Devoir, the newspaper Bourassa founded in 1910, to trace his evolving perspective on the war’s meaning and consequences. What emerges is not a simplistic sketch of a local journalist engaged in national debates, as most English Canadians know him, but a fully rendered portrait of a Canadian looking out at the world. Bourassa used Le Devoir to express his opposition to Prime Minister Robert Borden’s handling of the war, yet he also warned of alarming transformations in all of the nations at war, such as the growth of militarism, the failure of democracy, and the dangers of total war at home and abroad.

By situating Bourassa within a larger panorama that connects him to prominent war resisters from around the world, Keelan offers fresh insight into one of Canada’s most influential historical figures, reshaping our understanding of why Quebec’s position on the Great War differed so radically from the rest of Canada.

This book is must-read for students, scholars, and other readers interested in Canadian politics during the First World War, Canadian and Quebec nationalism, and international dissent against the war.

Review of: Gregorio Salinero, Hombres de mala corte. Desobediencias, procesos políticos y gobierno de Indias en lasegunda mitad del siglo XVI, Madrid 2017: Cátedra.
In: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History 27 (2019), pp. 345-348.
http://rg.rg.mpg.de/de/article_id/1287

Ciò che si vuole delineare è una  panoramica generale e orientativa circa gli elementi originari che, nell’età contemporanea, hanno caratterizzato la ridefinizione dei ruoli di genere attraverso l’esclusione di quello femminile dalla decisionalità politica così come dalla produzione industriale. Prendendo le mosse daquesto contesto, si è voluto indagare l’atteggiamento assunto dalle principali correnti del movimento operaio e socialista di fronte alla cosiddetta questione femminile. Ciò che ne è emerso è il delinearsidi un patto escludente tra il nascente modo di produzione capitalista, le strutture  patriarcali precedenti e l’affermazione dello Stato moderno, finalizzato al ridefinirsi in chiave conservativa delle gerarchie di genere e di cui il movimento socialista e sindacale ne fu in larga parte agente.

My dissertation explores the way in which vino came to be viewed as an ‘Italian’ beverage among the peninsula’s middle- and upper-classes both during and after the interwar years. More broadly, it seeks to illuminate the various ways in which influential agro-industrial organizations co-opted, and in some cases actively shaped, the regime’s ‘reclamation’ and mass mobilization campaigns by promoting the consumption of their industry’s foodstuffs and beverages as a ‘national duty.’ Informally led by the indomitable Arturo Marescalchi, the country’s Industrial Wine Lobby frequently beseeched Italy’s bourgeois consumers to replace their families’ consumption of foreign, or ‘exotic,’ beverages, such as tea, coffee, beer, and cocktails, with the peninsula’s ‘healthy’ and ‘fashionable’ vini tipici (typical wines). By analyzing the varying ways in which the country’s luxury winegrowers, merchants, and industrialists, in partnership with Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, sought to rebrand Italy’s typical wines as the country’s ‘millennial’ national beverages, therefore, this study intends to illuminate, as well as expand our understanding of, the complex dynamics of political agency and culture-shaping power in interwar Italy.

This text presents an analysis of several uses of the term 'crisis' in the academic works of scholars and historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as S. de Sismondi, J. Burckhardt, M. Weber, H. Pirenne, B. Croce, H Baron, among others. These authors dealt with the history of medieval communal cities and adopted extensively the term 'crisis' to explain the historical process of dissolution of Renaissance republicanism. It has been found that in such works, 'crisis' operates as a rhetorical device, with a connotative function, to express the subjective judgment of the author in relation to the situations that he, from his political-academic convictions, recognizes as negative or positive conjunctures.