Using interview material, this chapter examines the rationalisations involved in the imaginary dimension of republicans' relations with socially and politically significant others, principally members of the Protestant community. Imaginary relations are revealed in the primary operations of the ego, namely negation (where whatever is repressed may make its way into consciousness on condition that it is denied), projection, and splitting. Otherwise, imaginary relations are revealed in contradictions, jokes, mistakes, absences, silence, re-takes, hesitation, cuts in the text, etc. It is typical of the interviewees to represent the religion of ‘the other side’ as being a non-issue, a matter of indifference. Bigotry in relation to Protestants, which is consciously denied by republican interviewees, surfaces in this way in imaginary relations. Members of the Catholic community wish to believe that Protestantism is not an issue for them in contrast with Protestants whom they wish to present as being obsessed with Catholicism, fearful of this and bigoted against Catholics to the extent that they instil this bigotry into their children. The notion that republicanism precludes sectarianism and bigotry is an illusion.

This chapter reviews some of the key arguments that are in favour of NMD, and considers some of the lasting assumptions about the character of security and threat, as well as the concept of policy positivism. It then studies foreign policy as a practice central to the notion of ‘narrative activity’. The chapter also considers the intersection of foreign policy and identity, the influence of ‘what if’ statements and the meanings associated with ballistic missiles. It determines that the specific context of a proliferation ‘problem’ has made the construed picture of a rogue other a valid threat which is understood in the US foreign policy.

This chapter traces the origin and post-war development of the competing logics of thinking within Germany's security culture. It shows the importance of the German past in the struggle for moral and intellectual leadership in security policy debates and illuminates the key issues, arguments and taboos of the out-of-area debate by placing them in historical context. It begins by showing how the German defeat of 1945 left a strong imprint on the security thinking of German elites and outlines how different political and social groups learned different lessons from the debacle, respectively ‘never again war’ and ‘never again alone’.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century immigration to Canada resulted in a layering of settlers and concomitant dialectal diversity throughout the vast non-urban areas of the country, particularly in Ontario. This chapter examines the long-standing dialectal diversity that has been present in the province since English-speaking settlement. As a Settler Colonial English, this diversity is not a result of contact with the many different Indigenous languages, already spoken for millennia in different parts of the province. Rather, dialect differentiation within Ontario stems from the temporal and geographically staggered transplantation of distinct Scots, Irish and English dialects from across the British Isles at different times since the first permanent English-speaking settlers arrived in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we demonstrate historical dialectal variation in Ontario by way of an analysis of general extenders in data from early Ontario English.

Symbolic relations are the relations republicans have with the Other, out of which they invent themselves. Bruce Fink refers to these as ‘one's relation to the Law, to the law laid down by one's parents, one's teachers, one's religion, one's country’ or ‘the way people deal with ideals that have been inculcated in them by their parents, schools, media, language, and society at large’. This chapter examines violent republicanism, the legitimation of republican tradition, the morality of republican violence, and ideals such as liberation and non-sectarianism as they apply to the conflict in Northern Ireland. The self-idealisation that republicans are in possession of the truth and that this is innate perhaps explains why they feel they do not require a mandate even though the need for wider support in the community is constantly felt.

In order to provide further insight into how and to what degree major European security actors converge and diverge, this book presents an extensive and thorough analysis of official standpoints. The focus is on the relationship between the EU and Russia, and also on bilateral relations between Russia and the major EU member states. The empirical enquiry contrasts Russia's standpoints on security with those of the EU bureaucracy and with those of the three major EU member states: France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. This chapter examines the possibility of a pan-European approach, competing constructions of security, ‘EU-Europe’ as a security actor, and the background to EU-Russia relations.

With a focus on Western American English vowel systems, this chapter examines the formative influences on the Western US dialect region, framing the current uniformity in vocalic patterns as the outcome of koineisation. Using early written sources and dialect atlas projects, we trace the routes of early colonisation of and the dialect inputs into the region, focusing particular attention on California, Nevada and Oregon. We also draw empirically from acoustic vowel data from modern and historical recordings in an attempt to consider how the information we have about Western speech at different time points over the past 150 years fits with leading models of new dialect formation. Our account of the spread of English westward argues that levelling and simplification were set in motion in the mid-1800s in large part owing to the confluence of American English varieties brought with the earliest settlers. Further, it was likely the instability of the low vowel system across these dialects that laid the foundation for the modern Western koine.

This introductory chapter begin with a discussion of the resignation of the Santer Commission. On 19 March 1999, for the first time in the history of the European project, the twenty-member College of Commissioners resigned before the end of its term. This took place under the presidency of the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg Jacques Santer, after the submission to the European Parliament of a Report by a Committee of Independent Experts, working under the auspices of the Parliament and the Commission, which substantiated allegations of fraud, mismanagement and nepotism. If the EU fails in terms of responsibility to the extent implied by the Committee's report, it is necessary to understand why and how this came to be and why it is important that the problem should be dealt with. What exactly is political responsibility, why is it an important feature in any system of governance, and why should its absence trouble us? Finally, it is necessary to think about what can be done about it and what needs to change if the problem is to be addressed. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.