This chapter considers the implications of Blair and this study of him. What judgments can we ultimately make about his influence and his foreign policy? What does an individual as unique as Blair tell us about international relations? It concludes that, in real-world terms, Blair's style made a key difference to British foreign policy in each of the crucial episodes under consideration. Britain would not have been as forward leaning in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, would not have outlined such ambitious goals in the ‘war on terror’, and would have been much more cautious toward, and perhaps ultimately resiled from, the Iraq intervention, had someone else been leading the country. The incentives and constraints of alliance with the world's superpower, and the security challenges of rogue states and international terrorism, would have been faced by any British prime minister during this period, but actor-specific theory leads to the conclusion that Blair played a determinate role in these key episodes. In international relations, the case of Tony Blair makes the point in vivid fashion that individuals matter.

The ‘Irish problem’ has long been a euphemism in European Union (EU) circles for the contested status of Northern Ireland. The term took on a new meaning overnight on June 12, 2008, after which the ‘Irish problem’ debated across Europe was Ireland's second rejection of an EU treaty (Lisbon) and the consequent stalling of European integration. The breakdown of results for the referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon (46.6 per cent ‘Yes’ to 53.4 per cent ‘No’) was almost identical to that of the first referendum on the Treaty of Nice in 2001. It is evident that the ‘No’ to Lisbon does not represent a dramatic about-turn in Ireland's approach to European membership. This afterword considers three key features of this path: the lack of a ‘vision’ of European integration, the mediating role of the national political elite, and the public response to Irish official discourse on the EU. It explores how Irish nationalism's symbiotic relationship with European integration can be not merely reprieved but readjusted.

The upsurge in political violence after 1879 posed a series of complex problems for the Catholic Church in Ireland. The nature of violence, its scope and scale, and its origin presented challenges, which were new in many ways. The violent protest associated with the land question after 1879 heralded, or was symptomatic of, sweeping political change. Logue played only a minor role in the great events, which constituted the Land War. Publicly, Logue cultivated a studiously neutral attitude to the new political movement and land agitation in general. The Land League had its origin in the disastrous economic decline in Irish agriculture after 1876. As the economic crisis deepened, the League stepped up its activities and the leadership embarked on a radical and aggressive strategy. The disturbances in Ireland and the growing clerical involvement in the land agitation drew the attention of the authorities in Rome. On the issues of the Land League and the land campaign, in public at least, Logue remained neutral. It is, perhaps, an irony of history that one who did not seek high station was convinced of his unworthiness for the role and lacked the confidence and the inclination to undertake public responsibility should become the spiritual leader of Catholic Ireland.

This chapter considers the regions of England as potential ‘identity resources’ for the fashioning of a new sense of local patriotism following the pattern of devolution elsewhere in the United Kingdom. It explains that mobilising support for regionalism has always been problematic, and that while English local allegiance is deeply ingrained, it has rarely meant identification with a region. The chapter also discusses an academic thesis that there continues to exist a ‘national world of local government’ which is peculiarly resistant – in a very English way – to the claims of regional government.

This chapter provides an account of the historic strengths and weaknesses of what is called the English idiom, based on E.P. Thompson's essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’. It explains Thompson's argument that England is unlikely to capitulate before a Marxism which cannot at least engage in a dialogue in the English idiom. The chapter contends that there are powerful survivals of self-understanding in the case of Englishness which continue to inform contemporary national identity, and that they have a future as well as a past. It suggests that it is the interpenetration of changing circumstances and idiomatic continuity which sets the tone of contemporary understanding of Englishness.

This chapter takes a look at the ghost stories of M.R. James. It studies the way the seemingly conservative Victorian and Edwardian world of James's tales hides a critique of an apparently amoral modernism. It notes that some of his tales put certain demands on readers, and reveals that James suggests that the donnish world is truly Gothic due to its consideration of the unfolding pictorial Gothic narrative. This chapter also discusses how the modernist literary culture of the 1920s can be re-read through a discourse of spectrality.

This chapter examines Irigaray's more recent turn to eastern religions and the impact that this has on her previous position. Irigaray does not confine herself to subversive readings of the myths and images of women in ancient Greek culture or even to reinterpreting the Annunciation of Mary, but she turns her creative musings towards what she terms ‘Far-Eastern traditions’, specifically India. The chapter is an exploration of this turn in Irigaray's work and the implications of this change, which also moves beyond simply the imaginative to a more spiritually apologetic mode of writing. The chapter also discusses Irigaray's work in the light of recent discussions of Orientalism. In Irigaray's view, western civilization and religions have been dominated by the image of an omnipotent male God. She advocates that women begin to explore ways of becoming divine, so as to counteract centuries of a God made in the image of men.

On 3 September 1751, the French statesman René-Louis Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d'Argenson wrote in his journal that there blows from England a philosophical wind of free and anti-monarchical government. D'Argenson's assessment of the political situation in France in the mid-eighteenth century is significant not only on account of his prescient warnings about where events were heading, but also for his suggestion that the French were importing ideas of liberty and republicanism from across the Channel. Despite the wealth of research that has been undertaken on the emergence and development of republican ideas during the early modern period, relatively little attention has been paid to the traffic in ideas reported by d'Argenson. The English influences on French republicanism have not been fully investigated, or sufficiently acknowledged. In part, this may be due to the particular perspectives of those who have studied early modern republicanism—especially in its anglophone and francophone manifestations.

This chapter describes Theodor Adorno as probably the greatest Marxist cultural theorist of the twentieth century. The uses of Adorno's work are related to the fact that he is at once close to and distant from the perspective of postmodernism. Adorno is interested in the forces which restrict or act as blockages or which suffocate the potentiality for critical self-reflection. The chapter considers these blockages in more detail. The endlessly paradoxical character of Adorno's thought is central and certainly the reliance on paradox derives from G.W.F. Hegel's philosophical lineage. The best way to isolate what is specific to Adorno's own way of doing things is via the work of that proto-postmodernist and brilliant Adorno-interlocutor, Walter Benjamin. In his celebrated 'Work of art' essay, Benjamin sought signs of aesthetic and political redemption in the fate of contemporary cultural production.

This chapter turns to the better regulation policy of the EU. The main thrust is to look at and assess the tools, current quality assurance practice in the Commission and other EU institutions, projects under way and pilot projects on measurement undertaken by academics and stakeholders. The discussion shows how quality assurance processes, mechanisms and measurements provide either conceptual foundations or information that can be used in the design of a system of indicators. Another aim is to provide a clear picture of the EU institutions' own standards of regulatory quality, exploring how EU institutions approach the issue of quality.

This chapter explores the first major steps in the relationship between the European Union (EU) and Romania, culminating in the start of entry negotiations in 2000 and the return to power in 2001 of the Social Democratic Party, which would be the chief Romanian interlocutor with the EU over the next four years. Ion Iliescu's strategy of cautious democratisation without meaningful de-communisation remained largely intact. Progress with the EU application appeared to be the most realistic option for strengthening ties with the West. The EU's institutions of multilevel governance proved remarkably prone to lobbying from the Romanian state and the allies it had meanwhile cultivated in Western Europe in order to advance its cause. The 1999–2000 medium-term economic strategy proved to be an ephemeral document and the EU failed to prioritise vital areas such as administrative reform. The EU's multi-layered decision-making system failed to produce a hard-headed cost-benefit analysis.