The Past and the Future of Belgium
Author : Albert Joseph Carnoy
Publisher :
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 36,97 MB
Release : 1919
Category : Belgium
ISBN :
Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture
Author : Jane Fenoulhet
Publisher : UCL Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 14,65 MB
Release : 2016-11-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1910634972
Book Description
This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.
Belgium
Author : Samuel Humes
Publisher : Hurst & Company
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,87 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 9781849041461
Book Description
This concise history describes the traditions and transitions that over two thousand years have developed in Belgium in a sense of shared identity, common government, and a centralized nation-state - and then over a few recent decades paved the way for Flemish-Walloon schism that now threatens to break up Belgium. It responds to the question: Why does a government, unified for more than 600 years, no longer seem capable of holding together a linguistically divided country In tracing the evolution of Belgian governance, Humes describes why and how the dominance of French-speaking propertied elite eroded after having monopolized the land's governance for centuries. The extension of suffrage, combined with the rise of literacy and schooling enabled labor and Flemish movements to gather sufficient momentum to fracture the Belgian polity, splitting its parties and frustrating its politics. The presence of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has, in a tangential way, enable the Belgian separatists to discount the merit of a national government that is no longer needed to defend the country militarily and economically.
Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980
Author : Guy Vanthemsche
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 43,70 MB
Release : 2012-04-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0521194210
Book Description
This book explains how and why Belgium, a small but influential European country, was changed through its colonial activities in the Congo, from the first expeditions in 1880 to the Mobutu regime in the 1980s. Belgian politics, diplomacy, economic activity and culture were influenced by the imperial experience. Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980 yields a better understanding of the Congo's past and present.
Alien Policy in Belgium, 1840-1940
Author : Frank Caestecker
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 19,13 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781571819864
Book Description
Belgium has a unique place in the history of migration in that it was the first among industrialized nations in Continental Europe to develop into an immigrant society. In the nineteenth century Italians, Jews, Poles, Czechs, and North Africans settled in Belgium to work in industry and commerce. They were followed by Russians in the 1920s and Germans in the 1930s who were seeking a safe haven from persecution by totalitarian regimes. In the nineteenth century immigrants were to a larger extent integrated into Belgian society: they were denied political rights but participated on equal terms with Belgians in social life. This changed radically in the twentieth century; by 1940 the rights of aliens were severely curtailed, while those of Belgian citizens, in particular in the social domain, were extended. While the state evolved into a "welfare state" for its citizens it became more of a police state for immigrants. The state only tolerated immigrants who were prepared to carry out those jobs that were shunned by the Belgians. Under the pressure of public opinion, an exception was made in the cases of thousands of Jewish refugees that had fled from Nazi Germany. However, other immigrants were subjected to harsh regulations and in fact became the outcasts of twentieth-century Belgian liberal society. This remarkable study examines in depth and over a long time span how (anti-) alien policies were transformed, resulting in an illiberal exclusion of foreigners at the same time as democratization and the welfare state expanded. In this respect Belgium is certainly not unique but offers an interesting case study of developments that are characteristic for Europe as a whole.
The Brussels Effect
Author : Anu Bradford
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 37,43 MB
Release : 2020-01-27
Category : Law
ISBN : 0190088591
Book Description
For many observers, the European Union is mired in a deep crisis. Between sluggish growth; political turmoil following a decade of austerity politics; Brexit; and the rise of Asian influence, the EU is seen as a declining power on the world stage. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford argues the opposite in her important new book The Brussels Effect: the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image. By promulgating regulations that shape the international business environment, elevating standards worldwide, and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce, the EU has managed to shape policy in areas such as data privacy, consumer health and safety, environmental protection, antitrust, and online hate speech. And in contrast to how superpowers wield their global influence, the Brussels Effect - a phrase first coined by Bradford in 2012- absolves the EU from playing a direct role in imposing standards, as market forces alone are often sufficient as multinational companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their global operations. The Brussels Effect shows how the EU has acquired such power, why multinational companies use EU standards as global standards, and why the EU's role as the world's regulator is likely to outlive its gradual economic decline, extending the EU's influence long into the future.
The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right
Author : Jens Rydgren
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 761 pages
File Size : 17,36 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0190274557
Book Description
The radical right : an introduction / Jens Rydgren -- Ideology and discourse -- The radical right and nationalism / Tamir Bar-On -- The radical right and islamophobia / Aristotle Kallis -- The radical right and anti-semitism / Ruth Wodak -- The radical right and populism / Hans-Georg Betz -- The radical right and fascism / Nigel Copsey -- The radical right and euroscepticism / Sofia Vasilopoulou -- Issues -- Explaining electoral support for the radical right / Kai Arzheimer -- Party systems and radical right-wing parties / Herbert Kitschelt -- The radical right and gender / Hilde Coffé -- Globalization, cleavages, and the radical right / Simon Bornschier -- Party organization and the radical right / David Art -- Charisma and the radical right / Roger Eatwell -- Media and the radical right / Antonis A. Ellinas -- The non-party sector of the radical right / John Veugelers and Gabriel Menard -- The political impact of the radical right / Michelle Hale Williams -- The radical right as social movement organizations / Manuela Caiani and Donatella Della Porta -- Youth and the radical right / Cynthia Miller Idriss -- Religion and the radical right / Michael Minkenberg -- Cross-national links and international cooperation / Manuela Caiani -- Political violence and the radical right / Leonard Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh -- Case studies -- The radical right in France / Nonna Mayer -- The radical right in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland / Uwe Backes -- The radical right in Belgium and the Netherlands / Joop J.M. van Holsteyn -- The radical right in Southern Europe / Carlo Ruzza -- The radical right in the UK / Matthew J. Goodwin and James Dennison -- The radical right in the Nordic countries / Anders Widfeldt -- The radical right in Eastern Europe / Lenka Butíková -- The radical right in post-soviet Russia / Richard Arnold and Andreas Umland -- The radical right in post-soviet Ukraine / Melanie Mierzejewski-Voznyak -- The radical right in the United States of America / Christopher Sebastian Parker -- The radical right in Australia / Andy Fleming and Aurelien Mondon -- The radical right in Israel / Arie Perliger and Ami Pedhazur -- The radical right in Japan / Naoto Higuchi
The Civilising Offensive
Author : Christoph De Spiegeleer
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 443 pages
File Size : 49,13 MB
Release : 2018-12-03
Category : History
ISBN : 3110579170
Book Description
"This volume offers a multifaceted selection of studies on 19th-century Belgian reformers and initiatives they instigated to solve the ‘social question’ by ‘civilising’ and moralising the lower classes. Around 1850 Belgium was continental Europe’s most heavily industrialised state. From the mid-century until the Belle Époque many international social reform associations were based in Belgium, as well as their main international actors. This book aims to place the history of social, moral and educational reform in Belgium during the long 19th century within a broader European perspective. This collection of contributions by both young and established scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds not only fills some gaps in Belgian historiography, but also offers a better understanding of broad epochal processes such as the bourgeois civilising offensive, the expansion of educational action and the historical growth of welfare states.
Futures Past
Author : Reinhart Koselleck
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 39,91 MB
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 0231127715
Book Description
Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.
King Leopold's Ghost
Author : Adam Hochschild
Publisher : Picador
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 20,21 MB
Release : 2019-05-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1760785202
Book Description
With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.
