The last decade has seen the publication in North America of a plethora of academic books and articles about polygamy. The most important texts on the subject, however, are two court rulings evaluating the constitutionality of criminal prohibitions against the practice of polygamy. Informed by and in dialogue with this academic discourse, these courts arrived at dramatically different conclusions. In Reference re s. 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada, the Supreme Court of British Columbia determined that while Mormon fundamentalist polygamists had religious freedom rights under Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to practice this aspect of their bona fide religious faith, the government of Canada was justified in limiting this right under Section 1 of the Charter. Prohibiting polygamy was necessary, the court found, in order to prevent the real and substantial risk of harm that it posed to women and children.1 Conversely, in the United States, a trial-level court in Utah issued a summary judgment finding that a criminal prohibition against polygamous religious marriages violated the rights to freedom of religion under the First Amendment, and due process rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. This judgment focused on the state's duty to tolerate minority religious practices, while downplaying the potential risks of polygamy to practitioners and their children.2

This article shows how the material culture of nationhood can reveal a different perspective on the problem of nationalism. Using simple time graphs and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the article considers temporal and spatial dimensions of “nation objects” in an effort to understand the allusive phenomenon of banal, everyday national identity. Specifically, it brings together quantitative evidence for the pervasiveness of veterans monuments, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck monuments, as well as monuments to Germany's great intellectuals, and then examines the world of objects, largely kitsch, that these monuments brought forth. The article argues that, especially in small-town Germany, objects signifying the nation point to a national sentiment governed less by the sharp logic of ideology than by the harmonizing tendencies of kitsch.

Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, wie die materielle Kultur der nationalen Einheit eine andere Perspektive auf das Problem des Nationalismus bieten kann. Durch die Verwendung einfacher Zeitgraphiken und Geographic Information Systems (GIS) werden die zeitlichen und räumlichen Dimensionen von “Nationalobjekten” betrachtet, um das anspielungsreiche Phänomen banaler, alltäglicher Nationalidentität zu begreifen. Konkret werden quantitative Nachweise weit verbreiteter Kriegsdenkmäler, Denkmäler für Kaiser Wilhelm I. und Otto von Bismarck sowie Denkmäler für Deutschlands führende Intellektuelle zusammengeführt und im Anschluss daran die Welt der Objekte – größtenteils Kitsch –, die diese Denkmäler hervorgebracht haben, untersucht. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass diese die Nation repräsentierenden Objekte vor allem im kleinstädtischen Deutschland auf ein Nationalgefühl verweisen, das weniger durch klar definierte Ideologie als vielmehr durch die harmonisierenden Tendenzen von Kitsch bestimmt ist.

In virtually every research paper on this topic we come across we read that, in the particular context that the writer is operating, English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is on the increase. But what exactly is EMI? If we consider every classroom around the world in which learners are exposed to English language as their second language (L2) we are faced with a huge variety: English as a foreign language (EFL); Immersion, English for academic purposes; English for specific purposes, English for examination purposes, Content and language integrated learning (CLIL); content-based teaching; content-based language teaching, and so on. And then we have EMI. Here at the EMI Oxford Centre we define EMI as:

This definition was first used in Dearden (2015).

Long before Adolf Hitler’s appearance clouded democracy’s prospects in Germany, election battles had provided a means to disadvantage “enemies of the Reich” in the polling booth. Such battles were waged not only during election campaigns but also when new voting laws were legislated and district boundaries were redrawn. Maps produced during the Imperial era informed voters, statesmen, and social scientists how the principle of the fair and equal vote was compromised at the subnational level, and new maps offer historians an opportunity to consider struggles for influence and power in visual terms. This article argues that local, regional, and national suffrages need to be considered together and in terms of their reciprocal effects. On the one hand, focusing on overlaps and spillovers between electoral politics at different tiers of governance can illuminate the perceptions and attitudes that are constitutive of electoral culture. On the other hand, using cartography to supplement statistical analysis can make election battles more accessible to nonspecialist audiences. Combining these approaches allows us to rethink strategies of political exclusion in Imperial Germany’s coexisting suffrage regimes. Focusing on Leipzig and its powerful Social Democratic organization opens a window on larger issues about how Germans conceived questions of political fairness in a democratizing age.

Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws of 1935 generated legal commentary by Nazi jurists who eagerly extended its antisemitic principles—but not by Jewish lawyers, for whom the discrimination was too blatant and the risks of public criticism too dangerous. In the winter of 1936-37 in Leipzig, however, one obscure lawyer named Max Hellmann made an incisive commentary about the laws. Faced with prosecution for employing a female “Aryan” cook, Hellmann, a convert and widower in despair, responded boldly: he subpoenaed Adolf Hitler to testify and even moved to imprison him pending the judge’s decision. His defense was, in fact, a satire. It mocked the so-called Führerprinzip (leadership principle), i.e., the idea of law as the Führer’s will, at the heart of the Nazi legal system. Persistently contrasting the need for legal procedures with the primacy of irrational will, Hellmann showed that the leadership principle was incoherent with regard to the separation of powers, the role of the judiciary, the process of legislation, and the very nature of law itself. He provided a detailed critique of Nazi law that insiders, such as Nazi jurists, dared not think, and that outsiders, such as Jewish lawyers, had no reason to develop.

This article reexamines the diplomacy of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, focusing on two landmark achievements in 1970: the Moscow Treaty in August, and the Warsaw Treaty in December. On the basis of declassified US and German documentation, it argues that envoy Egon Bahr’s unconventional approach resulted in a poorly negotiated treaty with the Soviet Union that failed to address vital problems such as the status of Berlin. The outcome deepened political polarization at home and proved disconcerting to many West German allies; it also forced the four World War II victors—Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union—to save Brandt’s Ostpolitik by grinding out an agreement on access to Berlin. By contrast, West German negotiations in Warsaw yielded a treaty more in line with West German expectations, though the results proved sorely disappointing to the Polish leadership. Disagreements over restitution payments (repacked as government credits) and the emigration of ethnic Germans would bedevil German-Polish relations for years to come. Bonn’s Ostpolitik thus had a harder edge than the famous image of Brandt kneeling in Warsaw would suggest.