This chapter looks at how the Bundeswehr, which throughout the 1990s remained structured and equipped for territorial defence, struggled to dispatch and sustain ever greater numbers of troops abroad. While pointing to problems arising from the current composition and funding of the Bundeswehr, the chapter explains how Germany is in the midst of implementing a military reform that will enhance the ability to participate in international crisis management.

A Dog in the Middle of the Sea: Oik(t)os

From the very first scenes of Babis Makridis's Pity (2018, based on a script by Efthimis Filippou), it is striking to see how frequently all the characters appear in frames: not only framed by the rectangular film image, but also by architectonic and scenic elements in the mise-en-scène, an effect commonly referred to as a ‘frame within a frame’ (cf. Treske 2011). They stand in front of new, shiny buildings; they loiter next to spotlessly clean windows with views of the Athenian coast; they sit behind expensive rectangular furniture; they walk past recent additions to the coastline of Athens (from the early 2000s), including some major commercial and corporate landmarks. The buildings are largely empty, as is the coastline; yet, they offer enough vertical and horizontal lines to frame the characters moving around them even further.

A father-and-son duo visit their wife and mother while she is in a prolonged coma in hospital, only to find themselves more elaborately framed: by hospital doors, stands, beds and medical equipment. Later, one sees a dog abandoned in the middle of the sea by its owner, from a drone shot, as a spot at the centre of the blue horizon. There is no point or character in the diegesis that could make us think of this as a point-of-view shot. Neither is this constant framing and ‘measuring’ of living beings accidental. From a certain moment onwards, it becomes so excessive that it becomes the film. You are meant to interpret it as something more than the idiosyncrasy of the mise-en-scène.

This chapter looks at Mike Leigh's first feature, where he, with his partner Blair in Autumn Productions, funded their first project with the help of the British Film Institute Production Board and Memorial Films. The film Bleak Moments lacked the robust comedy of his later works. It also did not have the strong narrative structure of his subsequent work. Leigh himself once called it the slowest film ever made. It contained few jokes, but still it firmly established him as a superb, meticulous chronicler of suburban anxiety and repression. Bleak Moments was successful in delicately evoking that world of stifled cries and whispers; a world in which emotions are sublimated into food and drink, into music, into lists of artifacts, but never actually expressed. Its slow pace and the patchy sound quality were not withstanding, but it was a great calling card, revealing much promise for Leigh's future career.

This chapter gives a brief overview of: the nature of the problem of global warming; the international political responses to the scientific developments; and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Grasping the nature of the problem is an important first step towards understanding national policy and policy developments, since any problem poses a certain set of constraints on the choices of rational and strategic policy-makers. Nor can we afford to overlook international political developments when we examine transboundary problems, which inevitably erode the political significance of national territory. The chapter first looks at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the science of global warming, discusses the greenhouse effect, and examines international political developments on climate change. It then considers key developments after the third Conference of Parties and the implementation of the FCCC.

This book asks why the conflict (‘the Troubles’) in Northern Ireland endures and argues that the reason for this is the function of the unconscious in the reproduction of antagonism and communal division. The recognition of this dimension has important consequences for a theory of conflict management. The book draws on some of the most candid interview material to date with former members of the Irish Republican Army, recorded during the 1994–1996 ceasefire. It presents an outline of Lacanian psychoanalysis and demonstrates that its development of the unconscious dynamics of identity construction helps explain the reproduction of socio-political conflict as participants indulge in fantasy and rival over jouissance. It contends that the unconscious fantasies underlying the constitution of the political identities of republicans and loyalists are central to the reproduction of the conflict in that they nurture the desire of Catholics and Protestants to expand their economic, political, social, and ideological sense of self or identity, leading to domination, dependence, inequality, and the Catholic and Protestant threat.

This chapter considers the response of the hospital contributory schemes to the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in Great Britain. It describes the attitudes of the schemes towards the 1946–48 debates when they had to decide whether or not to continue in existence. This chapter traces the success of the surviving schemes to develop a market niche and discusses these developments in relation to socioeconomic changes in post-war Britain and to the evolution of policy towards the NHS.

This chapter examines the concept of ‘regimes of truth’, which characterise the process of verifying certain types of knowledge claims, and reveals how the military defence project forms a system that produces ‘accepted’ and ‘true’ statements about threats to US security. It defines the term ‘truth’ and explains the shift from the regimes of truth to NMD/identity, also considering technology and discourses of technology.

This chapter explores the early consequences of the demise of Bretton Woods and American financial liberalisation, reporting the repercussions of the United States' economic and military power. West German firms quickly exploited the new markets and investment opportunities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The events of 1979 led the Carter administration to another change in dollar policy, with huge consequences. The consequences of the second oil-price shock, and the foreign and economic policies of the Reagan administration, were more beneficial for the British and Italian modern democratic nation-states. The United States' final victory in the Balkans demonstrated much about US dominance of the post-Cold War world. India shares serious economic problems with other post-colonial countries. The international trading order that has developed since the end of Bretton Woods retains the capacity to generate significant political problems for the states of post-colonial developing countries.

In its unfamiliar role of minority language, Quebec English (QcE) is subject to discourse that characterises it as threatened and distinctive, purportedly due to intense contact and convergence with French. The popular and academic basis for these claims comes almost entirely from catalogues of ‘gallicisms’: incorporations from French held to be incomprehensible outside of the province. Based on variationist analysis of spontaneous speech, this chapter offers an empirical assessment of the impact of French on QcE, as instantiated in borrowing, code-switching and convergence. It shows not only that French-origin lexis is vanishingly rare in spoken usage, but that the morphosyntax likewise fails to bolster claims of influence from French at the grammatical level. These results suggest that the features qualified as peculiar to QcE are no different in nature from the regionalisms present in all varieties of English, and highlight the gulf between language ideology, sociolinguistic stereotypes and language use.

The history of homosexuality has often presented gay activism as spontaneously erupting in a fit of excitement at the Stonewall Riots in June 1969. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York City was formed in reaction to the Stonewall Riots, but the Front took its political inspiration from the wider counter-culture, feminism, black power and anti-war, anti-psychiatry and free Speech movements. The GLF announced itself through three major campaigns; the defence of Louis Eakes which tackled the legal oppression experienced by lesbians and gay men, demonstrations against the evangelical National Festival of Light which challenged religious oppression and GLF's campaign against Dr Reuben's book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but Were to Afraid to Ask, which opposed oppression by medical institutions. It was when the GLF tried to act on the third liberational stage, to Change the World, that it came most directly into conflict with both the existing homosexual reform movement, particularly the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, and the Trotskyite Left.

This book has examined the historical development of the ideal of equality and its role in the ideology of the British Left. The overriding theme of this book is the sheer historical durability of a particular kind of social democratic egalitarianism. This chapter notes that it is salutary to recall that the egalitarianism of the British Left was not intended as an exercise in pure idealism. It was aimed at rectifying the demonstrable social injustices of the British class system, and philosophical arguments were therefore ultimately constrained by considerations of political strategy.

In examining the conditions for radical political subjectification, one inevitably encounters the question of ethics: to what extent should radical politics be guided by a notion of ethics? This chapter examines the place of ethics in radical politics today, suggesting that the postmodern condition is characterised, on the one hand, by the breakdown of the Kantian notions of ethics, and on the other, by the uncanny return of conservative ‘values’ and moral fundamentalism. Moreover, ethics today increasingly takes the form of an ideology which is perpetuated by different institutions, and often serves as a guise for political domination and Western imperialism. It is therefore necessary to chart a course here between these simulacra, and develop a new radical politico-ethics. The chapter considers various contemporary approaches to the question of ethics: Jürgen Habermas' notion of ‘discourse ethics’; Jean-François Lyotard's ethics of incommensurability; Richard Rorty's liberal ethics of ‘postmodern irony’; Jacques Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis; and Jacques Derrida's ethics of deconstruction.

According to Anthony Elliott, psychoanalysis ‘powerfully accounts for the...essential and primary foundations of all human social activity’, namely representation, fantasy, identification and pleasure. It ‘highlights the fantasmatic dimension of cultural practices, social institutions, political norms’. For this reason, Elliott is correct in his contention that one must consider the place of the psyche in our understanding of human subjectivity if one is to bring about social and political transformation. For Elliott, the social world will never be the same again after reading Jacques Lacan because ‘his theories capture something of the strangeness that pervades the mundane and familiar in daily life’. It would be hard to argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis has little to say about socio-ideological fantasy, the denial which it involves, and the conflict it gives rise to. This chapter discusses Lacanian psychoanalysis; Lacan's Imaginary order, Symbolic order, and the Real order; the unconscious; rationalisation, socio-ideological fantasy and jouissance; jouissance and aggression; and the constitution of the ego and subjectivity.