Taking as a point of departure the seminal study of Newfoundland English by William Kirwin (2001), the current chapter examines afresh the role of regional inputs from south-west England and south-east Ireland in determining the linguistic ecology of English in Newfoundland, Canada’s most easterly province. The chapter reassesses Kirwin’s achievement in identifying relevant dialectal input and offers a consideration of the sociolinguistic status of the early English speakers on the island and the development of independent forms of English with the advent of permanent settlement there. The geographical distribution of settlers also represents a focus with the concentration of speakers in the capital St John’s and on the surrounding parts of the Avalon Peninsula. Features from all linguistic levels – pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary – are scrutinised, with the examination of vocabulary resting on the Dictionary of Newfoundland English with a view to determining the probable British/Irish sources of Newfoundland-specific lexis, independent developments in this part of Canada notwithstanding.

This chapter evaluates how elected mayors face the competing pressures of both running a large public service bureaucracy that is a council and leading the local community. The tension between political responsibility for public services and a broader governing responsibility is clearly seen in the way in which mayors have formed their cabinet and allocated portfolios to cabinet members. Councillors inextricably linked their role in service provision to notions of government and representation. Local Strategic Partnerships is a formal, government-inspired institutional arrangement that is rule driven and codified and set within the broader institutional framework of the local council. Organisational leadership of the council can affect the quality of public services and the mayor's electoral chances. English mayors inhabit a system in which there are two dimensions to their positions and power.

This chapter illustrates Mike Leigh's feature film Life Is Sweet, an important development in Leigh's working life that came in 1989 when he formed the production company, Thin Man Films, with Simon Channing-Williams. For the company's first production, Leigh committed himself to making a comedy that would have a potentially larger audience appeal than his earlier film, High Hopes. Life Is Sweet consolidated Leigh's international reputation as a man of cinema and as a great director of actors. The domestic setting and breezy tone initially gave it the impression of feature-length pilot for, or spin-off from, a situation comedy. With this film, Leigh succeeded in his aim of making a comedy with considerable popular appeal. True, some of the old charges of caricaturing and patronizing his characters were still there, but such criticisms seemed to represent the minority viewpoint.

Three substantial works see the Protestant and Catholic communities as being central to the conflict in Northern Ireland: John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary's Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (1995), Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd's The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and Emancipation (1996), and Fionnuala O'Connor's In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland (1993). In keeping with Jacques Lacan's emphasis on the centrality of aggression in the construction of identity, this chapter examines the literature that explains the Northern Ireland conflict in terms of communal identity and, in this process, notes the republican self-interpretation. It argues that the explanations offered are either inadequate or insufficient to effect significant change in the dynamics of the conflict and that Lacanian psychoanalysis is required to explain the conflict. McGarry and O'Leary cite the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, rather than religion and culture, as the cause of political violence, political stalemate, and political antagonism in Northern Ireland. Ruane and Todd maintain that the conflict is essentially a matter of historic communal division.

About 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain are in the form of carbon dioxide, of which about 97 per cent is energy-related. Overall carbon dioxide emissions fell steadily from 1970. After 1997, however, carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector consistently exceeded those from the domestic sector and in 2002 they exceeded those from the industrial sector. British emissions of carbon dioxide have been largely determined by the use of coal and their long-term decline is basically explained by the rapid decline in the use of coal. This chapter examines the emergence of global warming on the British political agenda, carbon dioxide reduction targets, national strategy for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, value added tax on domestic fuel and power, increases in fuel duties, the Energy Saving Trust, the encouragement of voluntary action, regulations and labelling schemes, targets for combined heat and power and renewable energy, and the politics of a carbon/energy tax.

This chapter argues that central to Britain's strategy towards Europe developed by the Labour governments between 1964 and 1970 was a close relationship with Germany. The discussion in this book attempts to break new ground. It focuses on the whole of the period of the Labour governments between 1964 and 1970, and analyses in greater detail than has been done hitherto the bilateral relationship between the British and German governments, as it was affected by the main foreign policy issues and multilateral pressures at the time. Whilst Britain's relationship with the United States would continue to be important and the United States' involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would remain central to Britain's security strategy, Europe would ultimately provide the means whereby Britain would exercise influence on the world stage.

In seeking to reach a verdict for the EU's responsibility deficit, this chapters attempts to summarise findings and evaluate the current state of affairs by looking at three interrelated questions. First, what can we make of the current shortcomings of responsibility on the institutional side after having examined the EU from the point of view of accountability, identifiability and openness? Second, how do recent developments, and particularly the failure to ratify the Constitutional Treaty and the agreement to forge ahead with the Lisbon Treaty, affect our assessment? Finally, what might be the long-term effects of the latest developments for the deep rooted Monnet conception of legitimate ‘responsible technocratic’ governance?

City/State/Performance/Archive

In November 2010, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens hosted a major conference entitled Athens Dialogues.1 With leading academics invited as guest speakers, simultaneous translation in three languages and cutting-edge technology allowing it to be streamed across the globe, the conference aimed to showcase the historical importance of ‘Greek thought’ to the world: what the Greeks had done and the reason why it still matters. Only, in this case, most of the participants and certainly the larger part of the audience understood this to mean ‘Ancient Greeks’. Modern Greece, including its handful of powerful private institutions and their well-handled cultural globality, was once again seen as the quintessential archive of a perennial past. According to this logic, Athens was the perfect place to have this ‘international dialogue’ about the undisturbed relationship between the present and its past.

Less than five months later, in the same Onassis Cultural Centre, spectators were able to see an experimental play by the theatre group Kanigunda. The performance started with one of the actors in the role of ‘Myrtis,’ a girl who died of the typhoid plague that hit Athens in 430 and then again in 427/6 BC, in the middle of the Peloponnesean War.2 The Ancient Greeks, once again! Yet, the process now was somewhat reversed because this time, with the voice and face of ‘an ancient inhabitant of the Athenian city state’ who had died during the ghastly biopolitical crisis of a plague, the audience was introduced to a postmodern political satire about the concurrently unfolding Greek Crisis.

Cunningly entitled The City State, this play was one in a series of works to take the Greek Crisis explicitly as its subject-matter.

The third phase of Germany's conversion process lasted from 1999 to the outbreak of war in Iraq in the spring of 2003 and the first major EU-led intervention of the same year, Operation Artemis in Congo. Changing constellations of proponents and opponents and changing issues characterised the three phases that gradually moved Germany away from principled military abstention to a policy of conditional engagement in the full spectrum of out-of-area engagements. In the years after the Kosovo War, it became clear how different logics defined the limits and possibilities of the new German willingness to engage in international crisis management. It revealed how the dispatch of German soldiers to distant trouble spots had become possible on the condition, however, that Germany's partners participated and that the mission served a clear and primarily humanitarian purpose.