Religion shapes Gulf politics in different ways depending on the country under consideration but also the shifting socio-historical circumstances at the domestic and the regional levels. Religion has been used as a tool of state-building by Saudi Arabia. Alternatively, it has also been used by Islamist movements for the contestation of established regimes. In societies that are diverse religiously, sectarian divides between various currents of Islam have been politicised more often than not. Religion has also been an important element of the international soft power of Gulf states. In the twenty-first century, Gulf states have promoted ‘moderate Islam’ as a way to counter Islamist movements and to consolidate their international standing.

Since the early 2000s, the European Union (EU) has explicitly committed itself to promoting the social dimension of globalisation. This chapter examines whether and to what extent a social dimension has been integrated into EU-Africa relations. It argues that the social dimension has been virtually non-existent and that decent work and labour standards objectives have been framed through, and overshadowed by, other considerations. The chapter elaborates on the social dimension of EU-Africa relations in empirical terms, looking at political agreements, budgetary commitments and trade arrangements. It considers the EU as a compartmentalised external policy actor, whose external relations are to a large extent shaped by the interplay of the different institutional sub-units. These different institutional sub-units have their own preferences on various dimensions of foreign policy.

Chapter 4 shows how novels engaged with narratives of racial coherence as Cuban slavery came to an end. Because of their ability to construct clashing voices, bring them into a tense truce via free indirect discourse, and engage the reader’s own knowing and refusal to know, novels were uniquely poised to stage racial passing. The chapter puts the first novel published by a Cuban of African descent, Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1892), in dialogue with two others: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) and Ramón Meza’s Carmela (1887). As Sofía shows, white identities were secured through hypocrisy and cynicism – an open secret that Villaverde and Meza had not fully acknowledged. In this way, the chapter traces the conditions of possibility for passing-as-open-secret. While in the United States passing is generally understood as a divergence between the private and public identities of a given subject – the public one being perceived as a deception that serves to hide the private one – these novels delved into situations in which this divergence was willfully ignored, and in which white identity was not invalidated by the perception of fraud.

The media tends to portray a European Union lurching from one crisis to the next. And in this brief history I have had plenty to say about problems, dangers, risks, and threats in the decades-long process of European integration. The founders were well aware of this aspect. Jean Monnet always believed that ‘Europe would be built through crisis, and that it would be the sum of their solutions’. Indeed, the European Union – as the European Communities before it – does seem to have a knack for turning crises to its advantage. Rather than leading to any kind of reversal, challenges have tended to reorient and expand the European project. So, we should not get carried away by excitable headlines, which often fail to do justice to the EU’s complex and sometimes contradictory trajectory.

This chapter analyses the first two decades of European integration from 1950 to 1969, a period marked by ambitious plans, spectacular setbacks, and unexpected successes. Starting with the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, the study examines how a complex system of supranational and intergovernmental institutions developed from modest beginnings. It shows that early integration was characterised less by a master plan than by pragmatic compromises and the external constraints of the Cold War. While the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954 showed the limits of supranational ambitions, the Treaties of Rome of 1957 proved to be surprisingly dynamic. The European Economic Community in particular developed into the centre of gravity of integration. One central outcome of this was the realisation that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), originally only an appendage to market integration, became the ‘green heart’ of the Community. Despite fundamental approval, people in Europe largely lacked concrete knowledge about the Communities. The chapter shows that in this phase the EC was still one of many international organisations: its later dominance was by no means predetermined.

In drafting a constitution for the democratic republic of the United States, the Framers took elaborate measures to control the hazards of minority and majority political factions. The Framers’ conclusion that factions are inevitable is confirmed by the partisan nature of modern American politics.

Prohibitioning and the Constitution of India

Prohibition was reviewed and re-conceptualised following the achievement of independence, when the foundations of the modern Indian state were formally established. In the long run, the prohibition ideal filtered through new administrative and legal frameworks that nevertheless bore the imprint of both colonialism and the struggle against it. As the independent Indian republic was premised upon the founding principles of secular democracy and federalism, prohibition had to reckon with both debates relating to personal liberties and issues of state autonomy.

Following independence, the national democratic state – having won the mandate of representing national society – sought to intervene in that domain in order to transform it. The processes that had accompanied the birth of the Indian nation had brought forth institutions, structures and practices that enabled policies like prohibition to be operationalised through the workings of the state. However, the problem remained that a national society still had to be fashioned anew from the fluid, overlapping identities that made up the fabric of Indian social life. Amidst such a ‘recalcitrant social’, which, Prathama Banerjee argues, continued to function as ‘a network of multiple nodes of caste, community and regional sovereignties’, postcolonial governmentality appeared from the very outset ‘a compromised project’.

In this, however, postcolonial governmentality did not constitute as radical a rupture from the colonial past as Banerjee's discussion would suggest. The careful balancing act that the nationalist government attempted to strike between ‘mobilising the social and mobilising the political’ had already set the tone for things to come before independence was achieved; prohibition's colonial-era origins are a case in point.