Given his French connections and influence, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke played an important role as a conduit for the transfer of English republican ideas across the Channel. It seemed that despite his Tory credentials, Bolingbroke's political thought had much in common with that of the Real Whigs. In addition to expressing views very similar to theirs, Bolingbroke also appears to have shared their cosmopolitan outlook. His works included numerous examples drawn from the history of other European countries, which revealed the depth of his knowledge in this area. His expertise on French history and politics was particularly strong and he engaged directly in the controversial contemporary debates concerning French history. Bolingbroke's works also became well known in France.

This chapter focuses on the policy of the administration of George W. Bush for healthy marriage and the family. It suggests that, during the Bush administration, the issue of marriage was often discussed in the context of the same-sex marriage debate and that affirmations of the importance of marriage were usually coded calls for the prohibition of same-sex unions. The chapter discusses efforts to address and eliminate the marriage tax penalty and analyses the administration's establishment of the Healthy Marriage Initiative. It contends that the principle of promoting and strengthening marriage as an institution bolstered the administration's ties with established morality and had a particular resonance with active churchgoers, while provoking little opposition or hostility.

The so-called 'earthquake elections', first in Finland and then in Denmark and Norway between 1970 and 1973, constituted a root-and-branch challenge to the unidimensional Scandinavian party system model and the old mould appeared irrevocably broken. This chapter presents essential background material and asks whether the ground-breaking elections of 1970-1973 created lasting fissures in the Scandinavian party systems and, if so, what new party types have emerged. The increase in legislative parties was not confined to the seismic early 1970s. The chapter concentrates on profiling four new 'party families' that since then have both institutionalised their position and lent the party political spectrum added 'dimensionality'. The eco-socialist parties and new radical rightist parties have been relatively easy to locate on a left-right continuum, whereas the placement of the Greens and new Christian parties, embodying post-materialist and anti-secularist values, respectively, has been more problematical.

This chapter examines the developments in Anglo-Protestant culture, with particular reference to its likely consequences for the evolution of American democracy. The factors contributing to the emergence of the Christian Right correspond to those underlying the wider rise of political religion in various parts of the world. The Christian Right threatened American democracy. It promotes a socially conservative agenda. The argument of the Christian Right is that post-war ‘judicial tyranny’ has reinterpreted the First Amendment in such as way as to distort the intention of the founders by creating ever-larger hurdles to religious involvement in politics. There is an interesting parallel between Samuel Huntington's argument that Anglo-Protestant culture is somehow central to American identity and Christian Right claims that good governance requires Christian input into the political process. Christian Right leaders are concerned with their loss of power and authority.

This chapter examines how the religious values of the ancient Greeks influenced their conduct of wars, campaigns and battles. It discusses how Greek communities prepared for and came to terms with war through their methods of communication with the divine and use of rituals and it asks what the Greeks believed was the contribution of their gods to war. This chapter explains that the Greeks believed their gods to have been actively involved in the mortal pursuits of warfare and combat, and the nature of Greek polytheism allowed for a bewildering fragmentation of the roles and responsibilities of war-gods. It also discusses the Greeks' pre- and post-battle rituals, their funerals and mourning and commemoration.

Whilst many transitional governments have indicated that they are committed to victim-centered processes of truth recovery, it is important to make the crucial distinction between the institution of mere procedures for change (and the rhetorical lip service that these can involve) and the need for a theoretical platform for truth recovery and political and social rebalancing which has at its core a fundamental recognition of the importance of language rediscovery and victim storytelling. This chapter provides a critical analysis of the nature of the destruction of language that occurs in violent societies, tracing the ways in which the voices of victims have been excluded by violent repression and marginalised or ignored by many truth commissions. Central to victims' social, cultural, and political recuperation is the reclamation of language that complements dialogical processes of truth recovery.

This chapter considers the roles of Michael Logue, who was the spiritual leader of a generation of Irish men and women, and that of the Catholic Church in the political and social changes in Ireland in the late nineteenth century. Logue had been ordained at a time of great crisis for the Papacy and the European Church. Since the middle of the nineteenth century the shifting political landscape of Europe had diminished the temporal authority of the Pope. In Catholic countries across Europe ecclesiastical appointments were handed out as court patronage, while the hierarchies in Protestant countries, including Ireland, were very much left to their own devices. Logue was a proficient Irish speaker and he was appointed to the post. In addition he was also given the deanship of a seminary and the pressure of both posts weighed heavily on him. Furthermore, Logue inherited a diocese with a Catholic population of 110,000. In his diocesan report to Rome in 1881, he revealed some of his concerns over education, poverty and issues such as the abuse of alcohol and gambling.

This chapter draws a brief comparison between the liberal emphasis on equality of opportunity and New Labour's rhetoric on social inclusion, to show how both have normalised neoliberal concerns. Specifically, both liberal equality of opportunity and the third way ideal of social inclusion foreground the importance of labour market participation as a cure for a range of social ills. Equality itself, rather than being seen as a precondition of democratic citizenship, is increasingly repackaged in terms of a right of inclusion to the labour market. Considerations of economic opportunity strongly inform political rhetoric not only on class, but also on the equality of women, ethnic minorities, and the disabled. Whilst the value of choice within both neoliberalism and liberal luck egalitarianism has largely functioned as a category of economic life, this chapter draws on feminist and socialist arguments to re-emphasise an opposing conception of active citizenship that focuses on democratic participation in collective decision-making.

This book discusses the concept of regulatory quality, approaching regulatory reform by taking the institutional context and the policy process into consideration, and using indicators to measure the quality of policies designed to enhance the ability of governments and EU institutions to deliver high-quality regulation. It designs regulatory indicators by considering four classic tools: impact assessment; consultation; simplification; and access and regulatory transparency. This chapter introduces the main themes and explains the regulatory reform and better regulation policy.

Tony Blair's foreign policy following the invasion of Iraq continued to display the features of a high perceived degree of influence over events, certainty in the framing of issues, and the use of tightly held decision-making processes, coupled with a determined closeness to the United States. Blair's room for manoeuvre was quite narrow during this late period of his prime ministership—having staked his career on Iraq and involved the British state in a war against the better judgment of much of the domestic political scene, he would have found it very difficult to recant the decision or resile from its consequences. The dynamics that had emerged in the run up to war—an eager prime minister seeking to rationalize and multilateralise US policy without having a very compelling hand to play—continued into the postwar phase. The extent to which Iraq had damaged Blair's standing in the UK, but conversely had strengthened his core foreign policy convictions, was manifest in the summer 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war.

The period between 1880 and 1918 would see prohibitory legislation put on the statute books for the first time, the passing of legislation formalising arrangements for the reduction of licences, and the State itself taking direct control not only of licensing regulations, but the actual ownership of breweries and pubs. It would see the Liberal Party repeatedly stake its reputation on the drink question, and a parade of leading politicians publicly identify the drink question as the single most important social problem facing the country. Does the State, while retaining free trade principles, have a right to directly reduce the scale of alcohol trade? This chapter looks at the drink question in England at the turn of the century. It focuses on the Licensed Victuallers Defence League, the test case Sharp v. Wakefield and its implications for local magistrates, the National Liberal Federation's adoption of local option as official policy, and the approach taken by the influential Church of England Temperance Society.

This chapter highlights sexual difference, the history of sexual difference and how sexual difference can and might be lived in the future. The significance of Cixous's deployment of language, the terms she chooses and the metaphors she draws upon cannot be considered incidental. As Deborah Jenson suggests in ‘Coming to Reading Hélène Cixous’, ‘Cixous is inclined to resurrect terms which in contemporary theory, have largely been relegated to the “metaphysical broom closet”’. Sexual difference is the difference that makes a difference in her refiguration of antagonistic subjectivities. Through her theorisation of sexual difference, Cixous comes to explore the possibilities of a feminine economy of desire and engages with the possibility of love as a condition for a post-secular calling forth of divinity.

This chapter looks at the ‘necessary context’ of Europe, in which many of the arguments about English identity are now being discussed. It explains that those who support the integration of England into the European Union believe that the process is historically inevitable, while those against the integration argued that it is politically undesirable. Despite their very different objectives, however, both pro-European and anti-European arguments have shared a common thesis of inevitability. The chapter also discusses aspects of English divergence in Europe, and suggests that the European Union is of value only so long as it ditches the unwarranted presumption to tell people that they are European and that they must act in a prescribed manner.