MIGRATION, REFUGEES AND ETHNIC PLURALITY AS ISSUES OF PUBLIC AND POLITICAL DEBATES IN (WEST) GERMANY

2002 ◽  
pp. 169-188
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Political Debates

DEMOCRACY AS A CONTESTED CONCEPT IN POST-WAR WESTERN EUROPE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLITICAL DEBATES IN FRANCE, WEST GERMANY, AND ITALY

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEPIJN CORDUWENER
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

ABSTRACTThis article explores how political parties in France, West Germany, and Italy conceptualized democracy and challenged the conceptions of democracy of their political adversaries between the end of the 1940s and the early 1960s. It studies from a comparative perspective the different conceptions of democracy held by Christian democrat, Left-wing, and Gaullist political actors and shows how these diverged on key issues such as the economic system, foreign policy, the separation of powers, electoral systems, and the use of state institutions in the defence of democracy against anti-democratic forces. In this way, the article reveals how in the first fifteen years after the Second World War, government and opposition parties disputed each other's democratic credentials and political legitimacy, and it thereby reconsiders the claim that there existed a broad consensus on the meaning of democracy among political elites in post-war Western Europe. It is argued that these different conceptions of democracy only started to converge after they had clashed during political crises at the turn of the 1960s in all three states. This study thereby contributes to an enhanced understanding the formation of the post-war democratic order in Western Europe.

scholarly journals A Forgotten Legacy of the Second World War: GI children in post-war Britain and Germany

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
SABINE LEE
Keyword(s):  
Local Population ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
American Occupation ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

AbstractWhether in war, occupation or peacekeeping, whenever foreign soldiers are in contact with the local population, and in particular with local women, some of these contacts are intimate. Between 1942 and 1945, US soldiers fathered more than 22,000 children in Britain, and during the first decade of post-war US presence in West Germany more than 37,000 children were fathered by American occupation soldiers. Many of these children were raised in their mothers’ families, not knowing about their biological roots and often suffering stigmatisation and discrimination. The question of how these children were treated is discussed in the context of wider social and political debates about national and individual identity. Furthermore, the effect on the children of living outside the normal boundaries of family and nation is discussed.

“Gaps” and the (Re-)Invention of the FutureSocial and Demographic Policy in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin H. Geyer
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
New Governance ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Collective Risk ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Future

To argue that the future was (re-)invented in the 1970s and the 1980s might seem especially puzzling in light of arguments that the optimism associated with utilitarian, modernization, and socialist theories withered at the time amidst widespread debate over a variety of “crises.” Nonetheless, it was in this peculiar constellation that ideas of the future became fundamentally renegotiated. “New risks” were juxtaposed with prevailing older ideas of social security that were predicated on individual and collective risk management. Focusing on West Germany, this article examines the various technical and political debates over “gaps” in terms of the finances, demographics, and trust in the system of social policy, which helped to put technical and political diagnoses of “new risks” squarely on the political agenda. This demographic argument is of particular interest, as it dramatized the unintended side effects of older social policy and created new, dystopian future scenarios of total systemic breakdown. At times, however, these discussions about managing the risks associated with Germany's demographic future verged on the utopian. New concepts of governmentality and biopolitics prevailed in this context. Moreover, pragmatic and sometimes technocratic concepts of new “governance” (and thus risk management) were proposed by social scientists and politicians as a means to address anxieties about the demographic future, and new models of risk-taking and risk-managing individuals also flourished at the time. With their descriptive but also prescriptive features, these theories contributed to ongoing academic efforts to explain the present and the future in terms of risk.

Trends in the Prevalence of Atopic Eczema in East and West Germany

1998 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-376
Author(s):  
Schäfer ◽  
Krämer ◽  
Vieluf ◽  
Behrendt ◽  
Ring
Keyword(s):  
Atopic Eczema ◽  
West Germany ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East And West

A Reflection on Crucial Periods in 50 Years of Social Psychology (in Germany)

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Katja Corcoran ◽  
Michael Häfner ◽  
Mathias Kauff ◽  
Stefan Stürmer
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Early Development ◽  
West Germany ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West

Abstract. In this article, we reflect on 50 years of the journal Social Psychology. We interviewed colleagues who have witnessed the history of the journal. Based on these interviews, we identified three crucial periods in Social Psychology’s history, that are (a) the early development and further professionalization of the journal, (b) the reunification of East and West Germany, and (c) the internationalization of the journal and its transformation from the Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie to Social Psychology. We end our reflection with a discussion of changes that occurred during these periods and their implication for the future of our field.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

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