The Pluralization of Protestant Politics: Public Responsibility, Rearmament, and Division at the 1950sKirchentage

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Pearson

In the aftermath of World War II, Christian leaders in Germany embraced the political ideology of Christian Democracy. Viewing Nazism as a form of materialism and atheism, which they blamed on the ongoing secularization and moral decay of German society, both Protestant and Catholic leaders argued that only the society-wide renewal of Christian faith and Christian values could provide a solid foundation for the future. Enjoying a privileged position in the eyes of the western Allies (particularly the Americans), the churches took on a leading role in the reconstruction of German society. And, working to overcome the postwar disillusionment of many of their members, church leaders urged their followers to take active, personal responsibility for political life in the new German states.

2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722199402
Author(s):  
Grace N. Rivera ◽  
Phia S. Salter ◽  
Matt Friedman ◽  
Jaren Crist ◽  
Rebecca J. Schlegel

Meritocracy is a prominent narrative embedded in America’s educational system: work hard and anyone can achieve success. Yet, racial disparities in education suggest this narrative does not tell the full story. Four studies ( N = 1,439) examined how applicants for a teaching position are evaluated when they invoke different narratives regarding who or what is to blame for racial disparities (i.e., individuals vs. systems). We hypothesized these evaluations would differ depending on teacher race (Black/White) and evaluator political orientation. Results revealed conservatives evaluated Black and White applicants advocating for personal responsibility more favorably than applicants advocating for social responsibility. Liberals preferred social responsibility applicants, but only when they were White. They were more ambivalent in their evaluations and hiring decisions if the applicants were Black. Our findings suggest that Black applicants advocating for social change are penalized by both liberal and conservative evaluators.


2020 ◽  
pp. 52-57
Author(s):  
Эдиль Канатбеков

В статье рассматривается политическая культура Кыргызстана как одна из важных основ политической жизни общества. Уделяется внимание на необходимость развития политической культуры общества, как фундаментальной основы цивилизации, основ существования общества и общественных отношений. В работе анализируется сущность политической культуры. Описывается проблема формирования политической культуры Кыргызстана как одной из актуальных тем, на протяжении многих лет. Рассматривается формирование и становление политической культуры Кыргызстана, как очень трудоёмкий и долговременный процесс, обусловленный определенными аспектами политико-культурологического характера. Политическая культура конкретной общности состоит из представлений индивидов, их взглядов, политических ценностей, политической идеологии и символики, политических норм, стандартов, стереотипов. Каждый субъект страны являясь гражданином так или иначе становиться свидетелем и даже участником политической реальности, тем самым на основе этих элементов и опыта человек формирует собственный взгляд и определяет для себя систему ценностей и линию поведения. Макалада Кыргызстандын саясий маданияты коомдун саясий турмушунун маанилүү негиздеринин бири катары каралат. Цивилизациянын фундаменталдык негизи, коомдун жана коомдук мамилелердин негиздеринин маңызы катары коомдун саясий маданиятын өнүктүрүү зарылдыгына көңүл бурулган. Изилдөө ишинде саясий маданияттын маани-маңызына анализ жүргүзүлгөн. Кыргызстанда саясий маданияттын калыптануу көйгөйү көп жылдардан бери актуалдуу темалардын бири катары эсептелинет. Кыргызстандын саясий маданиятынын калыптанышы жана калыптануусу саясий жана маданий мүнөздүн айрым аспектилерине байланыштуу өтө эмгекчил жана узак мөөнөттүү процесс катары каралат. Белгилүү бир коомдун саясий маданияты жеке адамдардын идеяларынан, алардын көз караштарынан, саясий баалуулуктарынан, саясий идеологиясынан жана символдорунан, саясий нормаларынан, стандарттарынан, стереотиптеринен турат. Өлкөнүн ар бир субъектиси, ошол өлкөнүн жараны болуп туруп, кандайдыр бир жол менен саясий чындыктын интригасынын күбөсү, ал тургай, катышуучусу болуп калат, ошентип, адам ушул элементтердин жана тажрыйбанын негизинде өзүнүн көз карашын калыптандырат жана өзү үчүн баалуулуктар системасын жана жүрүм-турум линиясын аныктайт. Тhe article considers the political culture of Kyrgyzstan as one of the important foundations of the political life of society. Attention paid to the need to develop the political culture of society as the fundamental basis of civilization, the foundations of the existence of society and social relations. The paper analyzes the essence of political culture. The article describes the problem of forming the political culture of Kyrgyzstan as one of the topical issues for many years. The article considers the formation and formation of the political culture of Kyrgyzstan as a very labor-intensive and long-term process, due to certain aspects of political and cultural character. Тhe Political culture of a particular community consists of individual representations, their views, political values, political ideology and symbols, political norms, standards, and stereotypes. Each subject of the country, being a citizen, in one way or another becomes a witness and even a participant in the intrigue of political reality, thereby the basis of these elements and experience, a person forms his own view and defines for himself a system of values and a line of behavior.


2019 ◽  
pp. 664-685
Author(s):  
Аndriy Kudriachenko

The article analyses the components of overcoming the national socialist past of Germany and the totalitarian legacy of the socialist era, identifies four historical periods, displays the fundamental difference and common features in the approaches of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic to the study of the national socialist past, and outlines a system of measures for the formation of political culture in reunified Germany. Various components of the policy of clear distancing from the Hitler regime and integration of former Nazis into new public institutions as a way to establish modern democratic foundations of Germany’s development are considered. The article emphasizes the importance of the generational change and critical public study of the painful past and an important role of the establishment of a new political culture. The growing public interest and intensive public discussions in united Germany related to the formation of historical memory are pointed out. The importance and significance of studying the GDR’s past and overcoming differences between citizens of the Eastern and Western parts of reunified Germany are emphasized. The article also outlines new approaches and visions of self-identification of a state, society and citizens based on the so-called constitutional patriotism. The author emphasizes that the German society has established the idea that any positive historical myths cannot become a basis for the genuine development of a country and that an antidote to the repetition of the terrible pages of history is not relegating them to oblivion but immortal memory thereof. Such an approach included an appropriate set of sociopolitical and economic measures ranging from property restitution and lustration to the payment of monetary compensation to victims of the regime and creation of memorial complexes. The author hopes that overcoming the burdensome Nazi and totalitarian past will continue to serve as a powerful guarantee of the democratic progress of modern Germany. Keywords: FRG, GDR, historical memory, World War II, national tragedy, historical heritage.


Homelands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 80-107
Author(s):  
Nadav G. Shelef

This chapter analyzes the division of Venezia Giulia, a paradigmatic case in which the partition of homeland territory in the aftermath of war came to be accepted as appropriate by those on both sides of the border. At the end of World War II, American intelligence services identified the border between Italy and Yugoslavia as particularly problematic and as a likely location for violent confrontations between East and West. Alongside the raging international conflict of the Second World War, this border zone was the site of an ethnic civil war between Slavs and Italians that was as bloody and bitter as any other. Yet, by the 1970s, this region became a model for regional cooperation. While individual claims for compensation for lost property remain, mainstream Italian nationalists no longer claim the areas they once fought for so passionately as appropriately part of their homeland. The chapter argues that this acceptance was not automatic or inevitable. Rather, the efforts of the governing Christian Democracy Party (DC) to stem additional territorial losses after the war and to overcome the short-term political challenges it faced in the new republic shaped the timing and process of the withdrawal of homeland territoriality from once-sacred land.


Author(s):  
Alison M. Lewis

This essay focuses on the questions of whether German unification resulted in a wholesale retreat of intellectuals from politics and engagement with social issues, as the rhetoric of failure would indicate, or whether the key debates of the period can be read instead as a sign that Germany is on the road to becoming a more 'normal' European nation. Before returning to these issuesat the end of this paper I first provide a broad historical and theoretical context for my discussion of the role of the concerned intellectual in Germany, before offering an overview of the respective functions of literary intellectuals in both German states in the post-war period. I then address a series of key debates and discussions in 1989 and the early nineteen-nineties that were responsible for changing the forms of engagement in intellectual debates in post-unification German society. I argue that the 1990s and early years of the new millennium hastened the disappearance of the writer as a universal intellectual and focused attention on the writer as an individualist and a professional. Today's youngest generation of writer in Germany is a specialist intellectual who intervenes in political and social matters from time to time but who is not expected to take a moral-ethical stance on most issues of national and international concern. S/he is one who frequently writes about personal subjects, but may also occasionally, as witnessed after September 11, turn his or her pen to topics of global concern as in terrorism and Islam. More often than not, however, writers now leave the work of commenting on political affairs to writers of the older guard and to other 'senior' specialist intellectuals.


1991 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Loewenberg

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 799-824
Author(s):  
Mieczysław P. Boduszyński ◽  
Vjeran Pavlaković

What are the consequences of a culture of victory in countries undergoing new state formation and democratic transition? In this article, we examine ‘foundational legitimacy,’ or a hegemonic narrative about the way in which a new state was created, and the role particular groups played in its creation. We argue that the way in which victory is institutionalized can pose a grave threat to the democratic project. If reconciliation and democratization depend of integrating losers into the new order and recognizing plural narratives of state formation, then exclusivist narratives based on foundational legitimacy pose a direct challenge to both. We focus on two Yugoslav successor states, Kosovo and Croatia. For both cases, we trace how appeals to ‘foundational legitimacy’ by groups that claim a leading role in the struggle for independence fostered a politics of exclusion, which ran counter to both the spirit of democracy. In Croatia, foundational legitimacy was partly challenged after 2000 by reformist political forces, though more recently it has re-appeared in political life. In Kosovo, foundational legitimacy was never successfully challenged and continues to shape political dynamics to the present day.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Michael Herzfeld

AbstractThai political life is caught in a tension, sometimes temporally rendered as an oscillation, between extremes of democracy and egalitarianism on the one hand and authoritarian relics of older structures on the other. The confrontation between Red and Yellow Shirts leading up to the 2014 coup might seem to suggest a binary model of Thai political ideology, but the internal complexities of both groups belie a simplistic model of two parties with diametrically opposed views and homogeneous composition. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to approach these tendencies in terms of political performances by politicians representing mutually overlapping and often strikingly convergent ideological tendencies. With the benefit of hindsight, I analyse the 2004 Bangkok gubernatorial election – and in particular one key rally held at Thammasat University ten days before polling day – as a case study in the value of an approach from what I have called ‘social poetics’ for understanding the dynamics of electoral performance, showing how the relevant social actors play more or less creatively with established norms of electoral conduct.


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