The Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) maintained a pragmatic stance in the face of violent provocation. The NILP, although ‘always very deeply committed to the link with the British Labour Party’, suffered in the early 1970s because of ‘the incautious speeches of Harold Wilson and other people from time-to-time—the famous spongers speech and that sort of thing’. Despite its decline, the NILP remained at the forefront of attempts to broker a truce between warring paramilitary factions at the height of the ‘troubles’ in 1972. The NILP's political fortunes took a further downswing at the Constitutional Convention election in 1975. The NILP's fraternal relationship with the British Labour Party (BLP) had been the ideological linchpin for many labourists in Northern Ireland throughout the twentieth century. The Campaign for Labour Representation continued to seek full rights for Northern Ireland's citizens to become full members of the BLP.

This chapter traces the challenges faced by the Irish Confederation, formed in January 1847, in trying to rebuild a robust, united movement. Resistance was especially strong amongst members of Old Ireland, who, paradoxically, showed their readiness to employ physical force tactics against their former colleagues. By the end of the year, however, divisions were appearing in the Confederation. A small minority led by John Mitchel, angered by the famine polices of the British government and the indifference of many Irish landlords to the suffering of the poor, argued for a social revolution to accompany political independence. Consequently, at the beginning of 1848, the supporters of Repeal appeared to be more divided than ever and thus the likelihood of a revolution was remote. Moreover, despite bearing the main financial burden of famine relief, many landlords remained aloof from the Repeal movement, while the poor were still dealing with the day-to-day realities of starvation.

In the seventeenth century, the stream of alehouse legislation in England was accompanied by a rising tide of religious anti-drink literature. The drinking of healths, toasts, and pledges caused particular anxiety among seventeenth-century religious writers. Numerous writers claimed that the drunkenness which occurred in alehouses and taverns was the result of drinking rituals. The Civil War led to a new intensification of the political symbolism of alcohol — both in terms of drinks and drinking rituals. Historically, wine was subject to far more legislative control than ale or beer. In practice, the kind of people who made up the political elite in the late seventeenth century all drank wine — at least, in the privacy of their own houses. Nevertheless, in the political discourse of the Restoration drink became a symbolic marker of cultural difference in which Tories stood for claret, and Whigs stood for beer. By the 1680s, historical and cultural distinctions between wine and beer-drinking had become embroiled in the new party politics which followed the Exclusion Crisis.

This chapter explores why European integration was linked to hopes for economic modernisation in Sardinia, but failed to have any resonance as a political opportunity structure for pursuing self-determination. Demands for self-determination were only loosely linked to processes of integration and regionalisation in Europe. Instead, the primary concern was breaking Sardinia's dependence on Roman patronage, becoming economically self-sufficient, and seeking to exercise Sardinian autonomy in a Mediterranean political framework, where Sardinia could act as a ‘bridge’ between Europe and Northern Africa. This option was much more attractive than trying to increase Sardinia's influence in the distant political and economic centres of Europe.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to come to the defence of narrative, arguing that it is a vital element of contemporary culture, lying at the heart of the processes through which humans make sense of their experiences in everyday lives that are, by virtue of their mediation through and across information, increasingly multi-layered and complex both temporally and spatially. It argues that narrative is an intrinsic part of a new informational economy which becomes its material and which it holds and articulates. Narrative lives because it is contingent and mutable, because it is changing and transforming rather than fading in response to alterations in the material conditions under which we live, which are themselves articulations of a social totality. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The collapse of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) armed irredentist campaign in February 1962 led to the cessation of its military activities against the Northern Ireland state. The Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) sought to highlight discrimination ‘against the Catholic section’ in housing and jobs. Invariably the close relationship between the CSJ and Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) was compromised by the presence of right-of-centre individuals involved in the Dungannon-based organisation. The Northern Ireland Labour Party's (NILP) close ties to the British Labour Party (BLP) were used by Terence O'Neill to beat the local party in the 1966 election. The effects of Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association's (NICRA) radicalism on the NILP were significant. The role played by the NILP in the civil rights movement is addressed. The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a revitalised sectarian brinkmanship on the streets of Northern Ireland.

This chapter develops the idea that musical improvisation within stylistic contexts can be understood as a kind of natural language — but as such must be seen in social, rather than in individual, terms. Thus approaches which decontextualise individuals and concentrate on their assumed innate capacities, or on their cognitive processing abilities, can get at only a part of the story. Performances are instances of collaborative social practices, not the output of isolated brains. However, much of the ideology and mythology of jazz revolves around the image of the heroic individual struggling to express personal truths within, but against, an environment of uncomprehending conformity.

This chapter studies arguments on regional power and European integration. It first discusses the concept of ‘regional power’ before focusing on the arguments about the impact of European integration on regional power. Next, the discussion tries to determine why European integration and regional power contradict each other and it examines a theoretical framework that is designed to study the different proposals about European integration and regional power. This chapter also studies the effect of European integration.