The conclusion discusses valuation, the activity of giving value to things and people, to stress residents’ economic and political choices.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a critical analysis of the democratic stalemate in European politics. It presents current theories of European integration and elaborates an alternative, structural constructivist theory of European integration. The book examines transformations in French European policy and France's foreign policy rhetoric. It analyses the integration of French politicians and civil servants into European Union institutions. The book looks particularly at the characteristics of French Member of the European Parliament (MEPs) compared to other political groups in French politics, and at the status of the European Parliament in the career patterns of French politicians. It discusses the European Parliament elections of 1999 from the point of view of the challenges they presented to French and Finnish society and state institutions.

This chapter demonstrates how the scandal which engulfed the York Lunatic Asylum from 1813 to 1815 constituted a clash between competing notions of social power and public authority. It opens with a brief account of the early years of the York Lunatic Asylum under its first physician, Alexander Hunter. It examines an incident in the late 1780s, when a small group of governors tried unsuccessfully to challenge Hunter's authority. The reform of the Lunatic Asylum was the most visible, and perhaps the most aggressive, example of the subjection of charitable institutions and their medical officers to a lay 'public' authority, but it was not an isolated incident. Events at the Asylum can only be fully understood as constitutive of a much wider transformation in the cultures and politics of early nineteenth-century England.

The Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) was hardest hit by the refugee influx as a result of its geographical position. The Soviet authorities euphemistically referred to the refugees and expellees who flooded into their Occupation Zone as 'resettlers'. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) elites attempted to convince the expellees in the SBZ that their economic position was superior to that of their compatriots in the Western Occupation Zones. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a gradual, though sporadic, improvement in expellee housing, but this occurred despite rather than because of the SED's housing policy. The discriminatory practices of local housing officials provoked great resentment among the expellees and contributed to their poor relations with the native population. It is clear that the expellees in the SBZ/German Democratic Republic (GDR) received more financial help in the early post-war years than their counterparts in the Western Occupation Zones/German Federal Republic (FRG).

The 'untranslatable' aspects of materiality might be inscribed within and against significatory modes as a destabilising form of turbulence. This particular relationship between materiality and meaning is demonstrated by the films and videos of John Smith, Scott Rankin, Anthea Kennedy and Nick Burton. Their work in a variety of ways presents a direct critical engagement with processes of signification, albeit by means of their destabilisation. Smith's work with sound in Om and The Black Tower centres on polysemy, shifts in meaning, the attribution of meaning and the deferral of meaning, in which 'meaning' is equivalent to the perceived or represented source of a sound. In this way Smith's work engages directly in a destabilisation of the model of sound-image relations that informs much of classical film practice.

Appendix A pulls together into one place all fifty hypotheses formulated in this book regarding the undeciphered Aegean scripts.

This chapter explores the ways that pagan monuments that are strewn across the British countryside have acquired conventionalised and often subversive meanings. It presents representations of the British pagan countryside in popular culture within a matrix of cultural, formal and historical contexts. The presence of pagan landscapes in popular fiction is, at least in part, based on the spectacular attraction of magic, myth, sex and sacrifice, which are well suited to audio-visual media. Iconic monuments of prehistory in horror-based cinema are often linked to human sacrifice within the context of a barbarous paganism. Blood on Satan's Claw, The Witches and The Wicker Man are British-made horror films that place 'pagan' sacrifice centrally as the source of horror: each are set in the British countryside and emphasise in different ways the links between the landscape and pagan practice.

This chapter provides context for the post-1959 Cuban literature, looking at literary culture, the whole set of processes, institutions, policies, spaces and the ‘circuit of culture’ affecting writing, reading and books. It emphasises that the post-1959 developments did not happen in a political vacuum, and that the new valorisation of literature, writers and the book was not a totally new departure, but, instead, had a clear basis in the patterns, experiences and thinking evident in Cuba before the Revolution. The basis already existed for literature to be accorded an unusual place within the Cuban cultural hierarchy and canon, and even within the processes of cultural revolution and decolonisation. The events that followed threw all of this into question, and began a radical and often fraught search for definitions of literary culture and revolution which created all kinds of tensions, but also opened up new opportunities.

The traumatic event can only ever become trauma-symptom through a reworking in the mimetic realm of memory. The uninvited nightmares of trauma-symptoms and the necessity to speak of the trauma-event in order to work through it are both mimetic iterations of the trauma-event. The performative punctum is the catalyst to opening the shimmering undecidability between reality and representation that causes the audience to stumble in their reading of the performance. The mimetic power in Walter Benjamin's presupposed ancient world links to the productive nature of mimesis which is available within Marxist theatre historiography as identified by George Thomson in the 1940s. The chapter explores the inherent tension within the theatrical image. In the two performance examples, BR.#04 and Still Life, the tension is palpably present, its articulation made and remade throughout the performances by the spectators.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the register of experience by studying the construction of identity among young people of North African origin. It describes the politicisation of immigration as a process which was initially illustrated by the debates about the parameters of the French nation and the reform of the Code de la nationalité. The book considers how the young people of North African origin who took part in interviews articulate subjective identities, by dealing with the parameters of individualism and community in original ways. It also focuses on both collective and community identity and how this can be understood in relation to both cultural and socio-economic experience. The book discusses the themes and various narrative 'clusters' arising out of the interviewees' stories.

The chapter introduces Habermas's key concepts for a communicative ethics and sets out the relevant debates surrounding his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics. It then looks at a variety of critical interventions which have contributed to reformulations of discourse ethics and how these themes have played out in the application of Habermasian theory to IR. Exploring the conversation between Habermas and those who have adopted and critiqued his theoretical position within IR serves to frame the wider debates concerning Habermas's project and sets out a number of key concerns with his approach. These concerns clarify why communicative ethics as it is developed in this book cannot simply map onto Habermas's own theoretical position. The chapter begins to articulate an alternative conception of communicative ethics which takes inspiration from but is not synonymous to Habermas's position.

OED traces the word spotter from a target practice marker in the 1890s through an observer identifying a target on the racecourse or above an early twentieth-century battlefield, to the postwar train spotter. As a Reuters journalist told a New Zealand audience, 'Trainspotters occupy a unique place in British society, the butt of jokes, abuse and, ultimately, social concern'. Like some other collectors, train spotters collect ephemera: locomotive numbers are signs unconnected to any marketable commodity. As the Second World War ended, British railways were just the right size and shape to encourage collecting; for the total number of locomotives was neither so small as to wither interest nor so huge as to daunt the tyro. Spotting's domain was wider than railway enthusiasm.

The final chapter opens with a hypothetical debate between cosmopolitan and particularist positions, which is then mapped onto contemporary political philosophy. It concludes with Joseph Raz’s pluralist and perfectionist liberal requirement that states should support culture.

British withdrawal from Palestine was a long-drawn out affair. Britain had been awarded the mandate from the League of Nations after the First World War but remained a reluctant ruler until the evacuation was announced in late 1947. As the civil war between the Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers intensified and boiled over into open terrorism. By 15 May 1948 British forces were in retreat, their strategic interests in the Middle East region uncertain, and the Labour Government in London determined to rid itself of this problematic territory. Effectively British involvement in Palestine highlights Labour's failure in the Middle East and its inability to balance wider priorities in the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union. But how did Britain conduct its military campaign in Palestine and, moreover, did the counter-insurgency campaign really end in failure? This chapter analyses the ebb and flow of civil-military relations in Palestine and sets the scene for the key themes of political will, constraints on the use of force, and the effectiveness of civil-military relations explored in the remainder of the book.

In the course of advocating forward-looking punishment, Plato opened up a specific line of attack on retributivism. He characterized backward-looking punishment as irrational, bestial, and motivated by revenge. This gave rise to a debate over the moral status of revenge and the closely associated emotion of anger, which drew in and divided philosophers from Aristotle to Camus and beyond. Of our two pioneer abolitionists, it was Pelli rather than Beccaria who attacked retributivism directly, following a line taken by the Stoic Seneca on vengeance and anger in succession to Plato. Pelli and later opponents of retributivism have been unable to deliver it a knock-out blow, for the reason that, like its standard-bearer the Lex Talionis, retributivism is grounded in the gut feeling, part rational, part emotional, that we are responsible for the evil that we do, that crime merits equivalent or proportionate punishment: that there is in effect a ‘good’ vengeance. This was, and is, reflected in public opinion and in the attitude and practice of judicial and political establishments, whatever some philosophers might argue.