Download or read book From Grand Duchy to a Modern State written by Osmo Jussila and published by C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces the political history of Finland from 1809 to 1998, a history that has been dominated by the country's geopolitical situation as a country that lies between Eastern and Western Europe.
Download or read book Crafting State Nations written by Alfred Stepan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political wisdom holds that the political boundaries of a state necessarily coincide with a nation's perceived cultural boundaries. Today, the sociocultural diversity of many polities renders this understanding obsolete. This volume provides the framework for the state-nation, a new paradigm that addresses the need within democratic nations to accommodate distinct ethnic and cultural groups within a country while maintaining national political coherence. First introduced briefly in 1996 by Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, the state-nation is a country with significant multicultural—even multinational—components that engenders strong identification and loyalty from its citizens. Here, Indian political scholar Yogendra Yadav joins Stepan and Linz to outline and develop the concept further. The core of the book documents how state-nation policies have helped craft multiple but complementary identities in India in contrast to nation-state policies in Sri Lanka, which contributed to polarized and warring identities. The authors support their argument with the results of some of the largest and most original surveys ever designed and employed for comparative political research. They include a chapter discussing why the U.S. constitutional model, often seen as the preferred template for all the world’s federations, would have been particularly inappropriate for crafting democracy in politically robust multinational countries such as India or Spain. To expand the repertoire of how even unitary states can respond to territorially concentrated minorities with some secessionist desires, the authors develop a revised theory of federacy and show how such a formula helped craft the recent peace agreement in Aceh, Indonesia. Empirically thorough and conceptually clear, Crafting State-Nations will have a substantial impact on the study of comparative political institutions and the conception and understanding of nationalism and democracy.
Download or read book Welfare Peripheries written by Steven King and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the development of welfare structures in the peripheral states of Europe. Focusing on Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Finland, The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, it explores what the welfare systems shared in common with each other and where the experiences of these states differed from other European welfare structures.
Download or read book The Ideological Cold War written by Johanna Rainio-Niemi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens new perspectives into the Cold War ideological confrontations. Using Austria and Finland as an example, it shows how the Cold War battles for the hearts and minds of the people also influenced policies in countries that wished to stay outside the conflict. Following the model of older European neutrals, Austria and Finland sought to combine neutrality with democracy. The combination was eagerly challenged by ideological Cold Warriors on both sides of the divide and questioned at home too. Was neutrality risking the neutrals’ commitment to democracy, or did the commitment to the western type of democracy threaten their commitment to neutrality? Confronting these doubts grew into an organic part of practicing neutrality in the Cold War world. The neutrals needed to be exceptionally clear regarding the ideological foundations of their neutrality. Successful neutrality required a great deal of conceptual consistence and domestic unanimity. None of this was pre-given in Austria or Finland. However, in the model of Switzerland and Sweden, (armed) neutrality was systematically integrated with the official state ideology and promoted as a part of national identity. Legacies of these policies outlived the end of the Cold War.
Download or read book Warfare and Welfare written by Herbert Obinger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the first half of the 20th century was characterized by total war, the second half witnessed, at least in the Western world, a massive expansion of the modern welfare state. A growing share of the population was covered by ever more generous systems of social protection that dramatically reduced poverty and economic inequality in the post-war decades. With it also came a growth in social spending, taxation and regulation that changed the nature of the modern state and the functioning of market economies. Whether and in which ways warfare and the rise of the welfare state are related, is subject of this volume. Distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, wartime mobilization, and the post-war period), the volume provides the first systematic comparative analysis of the impact of war on welfare state development in the western world. The chapters written by leading scholars in this field examine both short-term responses to and long-term effects of war in fourteen belligerent, occupied, and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching over the period from ca. 1860 to 1960. The volume shows that both world wars are essential for understanding several aspects of welfare state development in the western world.
Download or read book The Paradox of Openness written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ‘open society’ has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empowerment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds it. Scandinavia has long considered itself a model of openness, citing traditions of freedom of information and inclusive policy making. This collection of essays traces the conceptual origins, development, and diverse challenges of openness in the Nordic countries and Austria. It examines some of the many paradoxes that openness encounters and the tensions it arouses when it addresses such divergent ends as democratic deliberation and market transactions, freedom of speech and sensitive information, compliant decision making and political and administrative transparency, and consensual procedures and the toleration of dissent. Contributors are: Ainur Elmgren, Tero Erkkilä, Norbert Götz, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Johannes Kananen, Lotta Lounasmeri, Carl Marklund, Peter Parycek, Johanna Rainio-Niemi, Judith Schossböck, Ylva Waldemarson, and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila.
Download or read book Small States in the International System written by Neal G. Jesse and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small States in the International System addresses the little understood foreign policy choices of small states. It outlines a theoretical perspective of small states that starts from the assumption that small states are not just large states writ small. In essence, small states behave differently from larger and more powerful states. As such, this book compares three theories of foreign policy choice: realism (and its emphasis on structural factors), domestic factors, and social constructivism (emphasizing norms and identity) across seven focused case studies from around the world in the 20th Century. Through an examination of the foreign policy choices of Switzerland, Ireland, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ethiopia, Somalia, Vietnam, Bolivia and Paraguay, this book concludes that realist theories built on great power politics cannot adequately explain small state behavior in most instances. When small states are threatened by larger, belligerent states, the small state behaves along the predictions of social constructivist theory; when small states threaten each other, they behave along realist predictions.
Download or read book An Unproclaimed Empire The Grand Duchy of Lithuania written by Zenonas Norkus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Unproclaimed Empire: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania is an interdisciplinary study of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) that is historical in subject but social scientific in approach. It is also the first study to apply this comparative and social scientific method to the GDL. In this book, Zenonas Norkus draws on national historiographies and applies theories from comparative empire studies involving historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and scholars in the theory of international relations, allowing it to transcend differences in national viewpoints. It also provides answers to contested issues in the history of the GDL, and raises a number of new questions, including whether the Grand Duchy was an empire or a federation, and why and when it failed. By adopting this "imperial approach" of considering the GDL as an empire, this book brings something new to the research surrounding the Grand Duchy and is ideal for academics and postgraduates of early modern Lithuania, early modern Eastern Europe, historical sociology, and the history of empires.
Download or read book The Reconstruction of Nations written by Timothy Snyder and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet he begins with the principles of toleration that prevailed in much of early modern eastern Europe and concludes with the peaceful resolution of national tensions in the region since 1989.".
Download or read book Social Cohesion and Welfare States written by Christopher Lloyd and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aiming to go beyond reiterating the stereotypical narrative of the rise of welfare states, this interdisciplinary book examines the long-run historical processes of the development of the welfare state. It focuses on the complex political, social, economic and institutional transformations which give rise to these peaceful and cohesive societies. Welfare is crucial to the story of peaceful social integration and this book explores and explains this vital connection, taking a non-linear view of the history of moving from fragmentation to peace with comprehensive welfare institutions. Chapters collectively focus on three central areas: (a) types of socio-political fragmentation, (b) the interconnection of social, political, and economic forces that led to the institutionalisation of integrationist processes and policies (including re-distributional welfare systems), and (c) how this new institutional development helped achieve, or failed to achieve, social peace and welfare. The international panel of expert contributors provide case studies from a rich variety of country contexts, including Germany, South Africa, the Netherlands, Austria, and the Nordic Countries. This thought-provoking collection of essays is well suited for advanced students and researchers in social history, economic history, political economy and social policy. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Download or read book Gender Honor and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence written by Philip Gavitt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the important social role of charitable institutions for women and children in late Renaissance Florence. Wars, social unrest, disease, and growing economic inequality on the Italian peninsula displaced hundreds of thousands of families during this period. In order to handle the social crises generated by war, competition for social position, and the abandonment of children, a series of private and public initiatives expanded existing charitable institutions and founded new ones. Philip Gavitt's research reveals the important role played by lineage ideology among Florence's elites in the use and manipulation of these charitable institutions in the often futile pursuit of economic and social stability. Considering families of all social levels, he argues that the pursuit of family wealth and prestige often worked at cross-purposes with the survival of the very families it was supposed to preserve.
Download or read book Language Policies in Finland and Sweden written by Mia Halonen and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2015 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, authors from four disciplines join forces to develop an analysis of political discourse on a comparative and multidisciplinary basis. Theoretically the book draws on the concept of language policy, operationalising it through the politics and policies of Finland and Sweden.
Download or read book Independence Movements in Subnational Island Jurisdictions written by Eve Hepburn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dynamics for any moves for political independence in the 21st century are very different from those of the 20th. The aspirations of former colonies to independence are grinding to a halt; the rationale for selfdetermination is increasingly driven by strategic and pragmatic economic arguments, and not so much by nationalist appeals. Meanwhile, creative governance, fiscal vicissitudes and membership of supra-national bodies have ushered in examples of ‘sovereign states’ that approximate suzerain entities. Are independence movements active today aspiring to a different kind of sovereignty from their 20th century predecessors, one that secures autonomy at home, but which maintains a special relationship with a larger, richer, country? This collection critically reviews the origins, policies and aspirations of independence movements from the world’s subnational island jurisdictions, where a distinct and separate geography tends to facilitate the emergence of an equally distinct political and cultural identity. These island territories are the world’s top candidates for achieving sovereign status. And yet various factors are preventing them from making the final push towards independence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics
Download or read book The Origins of the State in Italy 1300 1600 written by Julius Kirshner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beginnings of the state in Europe is a central topic of contemporary historical research. The making of such early modern Italian regional states as Florence, the kingdom of Naples, Milan, and Venice exemplifies a decisive turn in the state tradition of Western Europe. The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 represents the best in American, British, and Italian scholarship and offers a valuable and critical overview of the key problems of the emergence of the state in Europe. Some of the topics covered include the political legitimacy of the aborning regional states, the changing legal culture, the conflict between church and state, the forces shaping public finances, and the creation of the Italian League. The eight essays in this collection originally appeared in the Journal of Modern History. Contributors include Roberto Bizzocchi, Giorgio Chittolini, Trevor Dean, Riccardo Fubini, Elena Fasano Guarini, Aldo Mazzacane, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera. This volume will appeal to historians, historical sociologists, and historians of political thought.
Download or read book Geographic News Bulletins written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wrestling with Democracy written by Dennis Pilon and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though sharing broadly similar processes of economic and political development from the mid-to-late nineteenth century onward, western countries have diverged greatly in their choice of voting systems: most of Europe shifted to proportional voting around the First World War, while Anglo-American countries have stuck with relative majority or majority voting rules. Using a comparative historical approach, Wrestling with Democracy examines why voting systems have (or have not) changed in western industrialized countries over the past century. In this first single-volume study of voting system reform covering all western industrialized countries, Dennis Pilon reviews national efforts in this area over four timespans: the nineteenth century, the period around the First World War, the Cold War, and the 1990s. Pilon provocatively argues that voting system reform has been a part of larger struggles over defining democracy itself, highlighting previously overlooked episodes of reform and challenging widely held assumptions about institutional change.
Download or read book Finland s Great Famine 1856 68 written by Andrew G. Newby and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-17 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will provide a thematic overview of one of European history’s most devastating famines, the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s. In 1868, the nadir of several years of worsening economic conditions, 137,000 people (approximately 8% of the Finnish population) perished as the result of hunger and disease. The attitudes and policies enacted by Finland’s devolved administration tended to follow European norms, and therefore were often similar to the “colonial” practices seen in other famines at the time. What is distinctive about this catastrophe in a mid-nineteenth-century context, is that despite Finland being a part of the Russian Empire, it was largely responsible for its own governance, and indeed was developing its economic, political and cultural autonomy at the time of the famine. Finland’s Great Famine 1856-68 examines key themes such as the use of emergency foods, domestic and overseas charity, vagrancy and crime, emergency relief works, and emigration.
